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Three Indicators You Need a Point of Sale System Built for Fast Food Restaurants

Three Indicators You Need a Point of Sale System Built for Fast Food Restaurants

If you’re managing one or more fast food restaurants you know just how critical your point of sale system is to your bottom line. The restaurant’s POS can literally make your customers’ experience a great one or a terrible one. If you find that the POS at your quick service restaurant isn’t able to keep up, is not easy to use and/or doesn’t have some of the more advanced features, you need to consider a quick service point of system system that will help you increase profits. 

Here are three signs your restaurant needs to upgrade to a quick service POS system

1. Your Back of House is Bogged Down by Order Errors 

Signs to look for: 

  • Order errors are frequent or recurring
  • Order mix-ups happen more often than they should
  • Orders get lost, misplaced, or forgotten 

Why it’s important:

It’s simple: Order errors lead to slower food production. In a fast food restaurant, this is a major blunder, leading to lost profits, reduced productivity, and unhappy customers. 

How a fast food POS can help reduce errors: 

Fast food POS software is designed to keep up with the high-speed environments of quick service restaurants, and can transmit orders quickly and correctly. Armed with a quick service POS system, your Front of the House staff can help make sure the Back of the House is given the correct order information as quickly as possible. Built-in customization features make it easier to ensure that your customers always get exactly what they ordered. You can even customize buttons on the POS screen for one-key order entry on your most popular items. This saves precious time and every second counts when you’re running a fast food restaurant.

Providing your customers with a screen that shows what has been entered into the POS can greatly decrease mistakes before they ever get to the kitchen.. Faster, more accurate order collection leads to better food production. And that leads to more loyal customers, less wasted food, and increased profits.

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2. Speed of Service is Suffering from Lack of Efficiency

Front-of-House Efficiency Challenges in Fast Food Restaurants

Signs to look for: 

  • FoH staff struggles to keep up with busy rushes
  • Lines are long and slow-moving, both at the counter and drive-thru
  • Orders and payments are difficult and time-consuming to take

Why it’s important: 

As a fast food restaurant, your customers expect you to live up to your title. They want fast and efficient service and accurate orders. Your FoH staff are the ones that communicate face-to-face with your customers and leave the biggest impression. It’s your job to make sure it’s a positive one. 

Older systems tend to stall or become overloaded when large quantities of orders are placed, and they may not have quick-service functions like configurable buttons or combo pricing to help speed up the order process. Slow processes, long lines, and extended wait times ruin the customer experience before it even starts, discouraging customers from returning in the future.

How a fast food POS can help reduce lines: 

An updated POS system for quick service restaurants not only streamlines operations, but provides an intuitive user experience so that FoH staff can do their jobs faster and more accurately. Customizable and configurable menu items make it easy to match your POS to your unique restaurant, while integrated order confirmation screens at the counter and in the drive-thru ensure efficiency and accuracy. 

Tablet POS is especially effective in a fast food environment. The added mobility allows staff to work cut down lines, and customers are happy because they’re being waited on quicker. 

Back of House Efficiency Challenges for Fast Food Restaurants

Signs to look for: 

  • Orders are coming out too slowly from the kitchen
  • Orders are skipped or overlooked
  • Weak communication between FoH and BoH

Why it’s important: 

The unfortunate truth for fast food restaurants is that when food is prepared and comes out at a normal speed, no one seems to notice. But, when it comes out slower than expected, it’s all you hear about from your customers. 

When it comes to BoH staff, it’s crucial to streamline operations and take quality control measures to ensure orders come out efficiently. This is because they are in control of the food your existing customers know and love, and the food your new customers are trying for the first time. You want their experience to be quick and delicious every time so they keep coming back for more. 

You might also be interested in reading our blog: Quick Service POS Software: 4 Killer Ways to Streamline Restaurant Operations.

How a fast food POS can help improve order production speed: 

A fast food POS system streamlines communication between FoH and BoH by sending orders directly to the kitchen through an integrated kitchen display system (KDS) customized to your menu. The KDS can display orders to cooks in the order they were placed, along with any modifiers or cooking instructions. It also keeps track of the time it takes to prepare orders, motivating staff to work more efficiently. Fast food POS systems are designed to function quickly screen-to-screen, for faster communication between FoH and BoH. By allowing these two systems—the POS and KDS—to work together in harmony, you can speed up orders, increase accuracy, and improve communication. 

You might benefit from reading more about quick service restaurant POS software with our Quick Service POS Technology 101 guide.

3. Upselling and Cross-Selling is Non-Existent (or Barely Existent)

Signs to look for: 

  • Your profit margin isn’t where you want it to be
  • The average check size is stagnant or decreasing
  • You see low sale numbers and excess inventory for sides, desserts, and meal upgrades

Why it’s important: 

Small increases per transaction might not seem like much, but those pennies adds up. Over the course of a day, a month, a year even, small upsells will turn into significant increases in restaurant profit margin. 

How a fast food POS can help improve profits: 

A fast food POS system can provide automatic upselling and cross-selling prompts to encourage higher average check sizes. Whereas employees may feel rushed during busy hours and may forget any upselling efforts, a fast food POS system can prompt them to ask, and if used as a kiosk, can even prompt customers themselves. 

That way, when a customer orders a burger, for example, and the order is entered into the POS, an upselling prompt can appear to ask if they want their meal in a larger size, or if they want to add fries, bacon, drinks, or dessert. Photos can be shown to entice customers further on a customer-facing display. 

Leveraging the Right Restaurant POS Software

In the quick-service industry especially, competition can be found on every corner. If you want to win the battle for customer loyalty, you have to arm yourself with the right tools for the job. Better POS technology does more than simply shave off a few seconds here and there or increase ticket sizes by a few pennies. It transforms your business.

When you switch out your run-of-the-mill POS system for one specifically tailored to the needs of fast food and quick service restaurants, you transform your business from an ordinary quick service restaurant to one that caters to your customers, works effectively, and stands head-and-shoulders above the competition. 

HungerRush offers POS systems tailored to the fast food and quick service hospitality industry, complete with the features and functions you need to address your biggest business challenges. For more information on HungerRush’s industry-leading technology,  New call-to-action  with us today. 

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