It can be tricky to find new ways to improve your restaurant sales. Ambitious brick-and-mortar business must adapt to digital advances in order to profit. Running a restaurant business means keeping up with challenges as well as emerging tech.

Instead of thinking about technology as a necessary evil, embrace it and utilize it to facilitate certain processes. With that in mind, introduce these tech improvements to boost your revenue.

Monitor Staff Scheduling

Your restaurant staff is the face of your business.  Their skill and decorum are an integral part of your reputation. Choosing the right people for the job is immensely important. That being said, those hard-working people have private lives as well: they get sick, want days off, or need to leave half an hour early to make it to their child’s recital.

While it’s all quite normal, as a restaurant owner, you need to know exactly the amount of people covering each shift. An understaffed shift creates opportunities for mistakes which can lead to bad online reviews that could damage your reputation. To help your business and employees as well, introduce a software solution for their work and vacation schedules, as well as last-moment changes. In that way, your business will work like a well-oiled machine, and both your staff and customers will be satisfied.

Offer Online Ordering

Our fast-paced world makes us busier than ever. We’re always on the lookout for solutions to accelerate processes or save time. This is why people embrace the idea of online ordering. It’s easy to get any desired food without spending hours in the kitchen. It’s especially appealing for those stuck in the office who don’t have time to go out.

A good online ordering software needs to be quick to load, able to sustain a lot of traffic, and regularly updated. If you don’t update your menu and prices, you risk losing money. A a well-functioning ordering platform can draw in a significant number of customers. Of course, you need to ensure the delivery time is respected, which means hiring more people to be able to deliver everything on time.

Introduce Self-Service Ordering

In a restaurant business, being quick without jeopardizing quality is the best recipe for high income and success. If your restaurant is busy with tourists from all over the world, the average order time can be considerable. Waiters sometimes have to go through the entire menu with guests to decipher each dish in their language.

Images of dishes helps with this issue. However, it can be more expensive to print visual menus and the menu itself could be too bulky. This is why convenient self-service kiosks are an optimal solution: there isn’t a language barrier. Every dish and each step of the ordering process is displayed in pictures and guests can pay on the spot. This fully-automated system allows for smooth service. It saves time, as well as money.

Consider Call Buttons

Efficiency in a restaurant is not a straightforward topic because it depends on many factors. Sometimes the place is just too crowded so customers have to wait a bit. But, on busy days, waiters may not see everyone signaling for assistance. If a customer has to wait too long, they may leave or post a negative review online.

To ensure your staff knows exactly when and which customer asked for them, consider call buttons. However, you should avoid the traditional ones that make a lot of noise. Instead, go with a silent button. These can be connected with a beeper-like device waiters would carry so they are notified when a guest needs a refill or the bill.

Implement a Digital Loyalty App

People love to receive free things. While traditional paper loyalty cards could do the trick, they easily get lost or destroyed. It’s safer and more practical to have a digital loyalty app. It also has superior tracking power so you know exactly who and what was ordered at any time.

By tracking people’s orders, you can anticipate which meal to give someone as a free meal. You can learn about what the most popular meals are. To know that will also help conclude which are the least favorite meals so you can change your menu to boost sales. If you notice customers love the desserts even though you only offer two, consider adding a few more to the menu, etc.

Wrapping up

Implement different tech solutions to help improve service, speed up processes, and increase revenue. Think wisely about what to implement. Something that works well for one restaurant might not be as efficient for yours. Take your budget into account when deciding what to add. All-in-all, technology has its well-deserved place in the restaurant business so you would be wise to embrace it.

Author Bio: Keith Coppersmith is a business and marketing expert who has experienced both the rise and fall of many businesses. As a regular contributor at BizzmarkBlog, he enjoys writing and providing insight into the marketing industry based on both practice and theory.