If you’ve visited your favourite restaurant recently chances are that you’ll have noticed the many layers of human interaction that go to make up a great restaurant experience – one that you’ll want to return to. From a welcome from the manager to interacting with waiting staff and the countless cooking staff behind the scenes, a great restaurant is a brilliantly concocted recipe of its own.

And with so many different people involved in the recipe for success, it goes without saying that there’s the potential to waste a serious amount of man-hours, at huge cost to the restaurant in question.

To counteract this, today’s efficiency-driven restaurant has turned to handheld ordering tablets as a way of genuinely transforming the use of expensive time – as well as delivering a more seamless and enjoyable experience for the customer.

The main benefits of handheld ordering tablets

1) Less Queuing at the Point of Sale

The first big plus is that you have less queuing at the point of sale. By taking the order on the floor rather than at the till, you project an image of greater efficiency, and don’t waste either your customers’ or your staff’s time. At a conservative estimate, you can save at least five minutes per staff hour by opting for handheld ordering rather than POS ordering.

2) Avoid Duplication

The second important point to mention is that handheld tablets avoid expensive duplication of effort. Filling out a docket book and then punching the self-same information into a till system is totally unproductive, and there can be up to fifteen minutes in saving here per staff hour.

3) Capture Those Extras

A third point is that the handheld option lets you capture a greater percentage of product sales. How many times has it happened in your restaurant that ‘extras’ ordered by the customer were not actually captured on the bill. It could be a simple request to ‘give me a double portion of onions with that’, but the traditional order-taking and kitchen printing system will very frequently fail to pick up on these extras.

4) Don’t Let All Your Staff Do Everything at Once

The final and perhaps most important point to make about handheld ordering tablets is that they save a serious amount of time by not having all your staff looking to do everything at once – from setting tables to seating customer and then taking orders. In almost every other form of ‘production line’, it’s accepted that having an individual performing a single action, and another individual performing the next action is the way to go. And apart from the time-saving benefit of allocating a singe task to each staff member is that you can upsell to a much greater degree. With a dedicated and attentive staff member waiting on a table, there’s a much higher possibility of selling unasked for tea, coffee and desserts – all of which have the highest profit margin of all the items on your menu, often hitting the 70% mark.

The bottom line is that use of handheld ordering tablets provide a huge potential for saving expensive staff time. But of equal importance, they provide a timely, slick and professional service to the customer which speaks volumes about the quality of your restaurant.

Want to find out more?

Contact us today if you’d like to find out how we can transform your restaurant through the use of handheld ordering tablets.