Diners want more—more experiences, more personalization, more convenience, and they’re willing to make drastic moves to get it. Delivery and online ordering are convenient ways to get a meal in our modern age, and they’ve been on a steady rise—delivery has grown 300% faster than dine-in traffic since 2014.
A savvy restaurateur could—and should—embrace delivery. But delivery alone doesn’t build up your dine-in customers and it doesn’t establish you as a neighborhood staple either. When guests come to your establishment in person, what are you doing to optimize their dining experience?
Embracing flexibility
Quickly reacting to meet your guests’ expectations is very important—but more than that, you need to be proactive, ready and flexible. The majority of diners make decisions on the fly. If they look you up, what will they find? Will reviews simply call your food good, or will they extol the virtues of an eatery that catered to their every need?
Customize your service with the right tools
Stroll along Flat Iron Square and you’ll find Cantina Carnitas, one of London’s best Mexican street food spots. With a focus on custom burritos and quick street service in a high-traffic foodie hotspot, the cantina needed a way to quickly enter personalized orders. A simple goal—but anyone who has worked behind a busy counter knows just how tricky it is to find that fast and feature-rich sweet spot.
A robust point of sale (POS) system, like Lightspeed Restaurant, was Cantina Carnitas’ answer. Attempting to track so many custom orders on pen and paper would have trapped them under a growth cap. Thanks to Lightspeed’s flexible menu options with built-in modifier functions, growth is within reach for Cantina Carnitas; if a customer wants it, their POS helps them serve it quickly and accurately.
Finding your people
Personalized service keeps people coming back. Restaurateurs have been proving this true time and time again for as long as restaurants have existed.People like to feel appreciated.
With the right tools, restaurants can stop relying on their staffs’ memory of their regulars, and instead rely on their POS—and get it right every time. The better the dine-in experience, the more likely they are to come back—so think about how are you going to optimize every dining experience.
Track and leverage data
Grumman 78 sits in a repurposed fire station in one of Montreal’s trendiest neighborhoods. Personalized service helps Grumman stand out in a saturated market, so they leverage Lightspeed’s built-in customer profiles to save relevant guest information for future reference. Becoming a regular at Grumman has tangible rewards in personalized service for diners as the restaurant’s staff are better able to tailor their service and recommendations to each diner.
Optimizing their customer experience goes beyond personalization, though. If a POS is helping power your restaurant, it’s gathering data on your restaurant too. What dishes are selling best? What hours of the day are you bringing in the most revenue? Get the most out of every dine-in experience with concrete sales data that makes sure you have the right amount of staff to provide personalized service, that the meal options you offer appeal to your guests are just as important.
Make your mark, impress your diners, and don’t forget to leverage your POS. Take advantage of everything it has to offer to make your customer experience unforgettable.
This post is sponsored by Lightspeed POS