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Good restaurants aren’t just for the food
An average meal can become an incredible experience if it is served in an environment that goes with it perfectly. On the other hand, poor service can sour even a Michelin star quality meal.
For these reasons, both the experts at the front and rear of the bar are always looking to improve the service they provide. Tablets have found a niche within this area in a way that not many other tech trends have.
Here are six ways tablets can enhance your diners’ experience at your restaurant.
1. Making it more inclusive
Our lives, society and communication have changed enormously in the last 20 years, let alone the last 50. Increasingly, the online world is seeping into the physical world and this is made possible through gadgets such as laptops, telephones and tablets.
These are often preferred – especially by younger generations – as communication methods. This also applies to people who have difficulty communicating, whether through disability or social anxiety, and who offer a new way of expressing themselves.
By using the tablets effectively, customers can order their food and drinks in a way that does not make them feel uncomfortable or under pressure. They can select their choice without critical eyes, and calmly have it delivered to their table or picked up from a counter.
2. Making everything more personal
Applications installed on tablets mean that, with just a small amount of data, recommendations can be visible to customers with the touch of a finger. Personalization is made available to diners in a way that was not possible before.
A diner can create personalized menus based on their dietary needs, and not on what you or your chef think is best (although it is). Whether a person is allergic to certain ingredients, vegan, vegetarian, or gluten-allergic, the menu can be tailored to display suitable meals for each customer.
Some more sophisticated models can collect enough data from a single customer after just a few visits that they can start offering favorites and suggest similar dishes they’d like to try. Custom menus make customers feel special and that’s a great start to the night.
3. Menus always updated
Paying attention to details is key in this business. With tablets, you can avoid minor annoyances like food and drink stains on menus, making them difficult to read. You won’t have to keep printing new menus and buying covers for them. The strikeouts, hand-edits, and cover tapes are gone forever.
Additionally, the up-to-date stock count can tell customers exactly when a dish is out of stock or is no longer available. Anything else is a second option once your first order has been declined – risking a customer leaving disappointed and dreaming of the dish they might have tasted.
This level of feedback is bi-directional, the customer can also remove items from their menu, for example nuts or foods that contain lactose. Notes like ‘extra olives on pizza’ and ‘please serve sauce on the side’ can be clearly communicated to the kitchen.
4. You minimize long waits
Three things that can spoil an otherwise exceptional meal include:
- An overzealous waiter who is annoying when ordering
- Being ignored for a long time after asking for a few minutes to decide
- Waiting a long time for the bill to arrive and paying for a meal
Tablets placed on the table with a point of sale system make paying the bill and leaving the restaurant more agile. A miracle for people who have been eating with bad company and can’t wait to get out of there – or just those in a hurry.
Tablets provide a unique opportunity for restaurants to interact with their clientele. Games, bespoke information packages and videos are used to provide greater depth to the experience. A tablet with an interactive game installed can be the way to keep children at the table and undisturbed.
5. You minimize human error
A customer may ask for the wrong thing in a distracted moment or not fully understand what a waiter is saying. A mistake in the kitchen can produce a meal that is not what you ordered.
These mistakes happen even in the best organized restaurants, a customer-facing restaurant menu on an ordering tablet helps eliminate these misunderstandings.
In addition, a well-handled tablet contains nutritional information and allergen advice for specific dishes.
This is not only good service, but it can reduce the risk for people with allergies.
The memory of a tablet can become an effective witness in a disagreement if the wrong plate ends up on the table.
6. Put the food to cook
Kitchen staff will no longer struggle to read scribbled notes, while trying to figure out which order to prepare next. An integrated system could generate a bill of materials for each order and update the raw material planning system on the fly.
This information can be entered into the menu system and allow automatic removal of menu items that are temporarily out of stock. It could also go as far as suggesting specials on dishes that are low on demand and whose ingredients may expire.
None of this would be possible without restaurant tablet menus. An integrated system like this takes a lot of stress out of the kitchen, and this is reflected in the quality of the food of a happy, comfortable and calm chef in his kitchen.
The future of restoration is an exciting prospect, the growth that has taken place in recent years only seeks to move forward. Tablets have been one of the major developments in recent years, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.