“I’m short staffed, how will we accomplish all our tasks and maintain good customer service?”
“How do I free up more time for my staff to greet customers and keep our facilities clean?”
“More workers are quitting the restaurant industry; how will I keep up with less employees?”
The restaurant labor shortage continues to challenge brands to effectively fulfill orders while maintaining a level of customer service that will keep guests coming back. With much uncertainty still looming around labor improvements, restaurants are desperate for ways to help their staff keep up with customer demand.
In this post, we will explore various technology offerings that can help brands set up their employees for success by freeing up more time for them to service guests and complete more meaningful tasks than just taking orders.
Implement self-ordering kiosks
Invest in online & mobile ordering
Explore opening a ghost kitchen
Use data to optimize restaurant operations
4 ways to increase your restaurant staff’s productivity
Implement self-ordering kiosks
You have probably heard by now the rising popularity in self-ordering kiosks among major quick-service and fast casual brands. The reason why? For one, guests prefer them and two, they just work.
In the current market, attracting talented job seekers seems like a near impossible feat for restaurant owners and managers. To make the best use of current employees, many businesses are turning to self-ordering kiosks to alleviate some of the pressures of the front of house operations. Specifically, taking orders. With fewer staff to take orders, longer lines and wait times are frustrating customers, resulting in more complaints and less return visits. So, how do self-order kiosks help to address these issues? By providing more optionality and control in the hands of guests.
Want to reduce your line count and increase speed of service? Using restaurant kiosks, you can strategically place stations that provide your guests the option to wait in line for a staff member to place their order or to place it themselves at one of your kiosks. Through added optionality, you free up more space for foot traffic, decreasing the likelihood of long lines and eliminate the need for additional cashiers to take orders. Instead, your staff can spend more time greeting customers and maintaining facility cleanliness, significantly improving your customer experience, and drastically increasing the probability of returning guests.
Invest in online & mobile ordering
Creating a strong digital presence is one of the most effective ways to reach more customers and grow your order count and value without requiring extra labor from your staff. Directly integrated with your POS, your online and mobile ordering systems enable you to send orders directly to your kitchen and easily manage incoming orders all from one central location with little to no touch with your employees. With a streamlined process in place, your staff can focus on in-store customer service and supporting other on-premise teams to ensure operations run smoothly and not be overwhelmed by the influx of digital orders.
Explore opening a ghost kitchen operation
A concept gaining more traction in the marketplace in the wake of Covid-19 and a response to the labor shortage is the idea of ghost kitchens. Ghost kitchens are physical food kitchens without waiters or dining rooms designed to fulfill off-premise orders. With little to no public presence, ghost kitchens offer a leaner business model to take advantage of the growing popularity in pick-up and delivery trends with consumers from third-party marketplaces such as DoorDash, Grubhub and UberEats.
Ghost kitchens also offer brands the ability to gain market share without having to build a traditional brick-and-mortar restaurant or hire additional staff. Without the need for dining space or front of house employees to service customers, restaurants can allocate more off-premise orders to remote ghost kitchen sites to lighten the workload for their primary on-site employees. In turn, businesses can equally space on-site and digital orders across their physical and ghost kitchen locations to ensure staff has the means to service customers, fulfill orders and keep facilities clean at all times.
Use data to optimize your operations
There is no better time than now to embrace data to gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace. When it comes to allocating your staff’s time and effort, leaning on your digital and in-store analytics can be your saving grace to optimize your store(s) to run at peak performance. Identifying key metrics such as preferred on-premise methods of ordering at or average order fulfillment time can help you properly station staff to support the key areas of the restaurant that are driving revenue for your bottom line. You can also tap into digital insights to pivot as needed to support incoming online and mobile orders as well as construct efficient processes for pick-up and delivery at your brick-and-mortar stores or ghost kitchens. By eliminating the guessing game with operational insights, you can make more data-driven decisions to make the best use of your staff and increase their output over time.
Need help increasing your staff’s productivity?
Contact Tillster today to learn how our technology solutions and services can help unlock more productivity within your existing restaurant staff to help combat the ongoing industry labor shortage.
