Faster payment
How long does it take for your cash register to charge? No one likes to wait in line – or wait unreasonably long for the transaction to go through. A queue due to a slow payment process is not only an annoyance – it also signals to people entering the restaurant that this is a place with slow service. Something that can make guests turn around at the door and go next door instead.
Guests can’t afford to sacrifice an extra half hour for lunch. Nor do they think a beer is worth 20 minutes of queuing. Quick turnaround is a must – it should be quick to pay (before or after the meal) and if there has to be a queue, it should end inside the doors. Not on the terrace! What you can do to meet these wishes (which are perfectly reasonable) is to invest in a cash register that can take payments from several card terminals simultaneously. This means shorter queues and customers don’t have to wait for a friend’s transaction to go through before they can order. Time is cut in half!
Just being able to handle 3-4 extra lunch guests per day will shorten the queues considerably. And if you do the math, 3-4 lunches a day is a lot of money in a year. With a quick extrapolation, we can see that 80 x 4 x 260 gives you an extra 83 200 SEK per year. Fair sum! The fact that you can charge more quickly also means that more customers can be accommodated in the restaurant – and you sell more.
What do you do if the cash register crashes and you can’t get paid at all? You can find our tips here!
Natural additional sales
Can guests be encouraged to buy more without feeling pressured? More sales need not be intrusive. And it doesn’t always have to be the classic way – where staff ask each customer if they want more than one dipping sauce with their fries. Not all staff are comfortable with upselling and they often end up avoiding (or forgetting) to ask that extra question. The guest who overhears the staff asking the same question to everyone in the restaurant may also be discouraged from saying yes to that dipping sauce – because it feels tedious.
For those who do not have à la carte, express checkouts can be a beneficial investment. Both because you can reduce your personnel costs (fewer people at the cash register) and offer customers additional sales in a discreet way. When the guest selects a dish from the express checkout, recommendations appear on the screen, prompting an additional purchase. For example, “Would you like a cookie with your coffee?”. Once the customer has made their choice, they simply press a button to pay, pick up a tray of food, or receive it from the staff against a presented receipt.
This makes it easy for customers to click on that extra purchase – at their leisure and without feeling rushed. Imagine that every customer who shops is asked the question, then it is enough for 5-20% to be successful for sales to increase. Higher average bills and in the long run the cash register can pay for itself!