Keeping your customers happy and engaged while they are visiting your venue often boils down to one simple thing – delivering a high quality and consistent customer experience every time they interact with you. But how do you achieve this? By understanding how your customers want to interact with you and letting them choose what suits them. It sounds simple enough, but most venues find that not all customers want to interact in the same way. On top of that, your customer may want to interact with you differently depending on where they are and what they are doing in your venue. They may want to self-service in your car park, at your bar or pop-up fast food outlet during a special event, but they also may want a more personalised service in your restaurant.
It’s all about customer choice
This is where technology can help you to make it easy for your customers to order and pay in a way that suits them. You might have kiosks in your car park, mobile or self-service tablet ordering for in-seat or in-suite purchases, and for gaming venues, the option of at machine ordering. By introducing POS self-service and mobility into your venue, you can give your customers the choice of how they engage with you, whenever they want, from wherever they are in your venue.
The key to making self-service work is to provide a simple, straightforward way for your customers to order and pay on their own. It needs to be seamlessly and fully integrated with your existing POS and loyalty systems. Why? So that it’s fast and easy for your customers to use and because its connected to your back of house, there won’t be an impact to your existing processes and most importantly, no difference in the speed and quality of delivering food and beverages to your customers. Every order goes through the same process regardless of if it’s submitted by a customer or staff member from anywhere across your venue.
What’s in it for your venue?
The biggest advantage of self-service is that you are giving your customer what they want. Most customers who choose self-service expect it to be fast and convenient – they don’t want to be standing in a queue or waiting for a staff member to take their order when they could be enjoying their time in your venue.
There are other fiscal benefits as well. It’s well documented that self-service can boost spending by up to 30%. There are multiple reasons for the spending uplift. Customers can customise their orders and they are also likely to place larger orders without a staff member looking on.
You will also benefit from increased operational efficiency by reducing bottlenecks during busy times at traditional, static POS terminals because customers or staff can interact with the POS to place orders that are linked with venue workflows from anywhere. Mobile and self-service POS also allows you to upscale during busy times, or during one-off large-scale events.
Taking a combined approach
The ideal approach for venues to ordering and payment processing should be fully integrated across multiple channels. A combination of traditional POS terminals, tableside or handheld ordering, self-service kiosks, as well as mobile or online ordering will allow you to deliver that personalised service your customer wants.
Want to learn more about mobile and self-service POS? Go to Point of Sale – MSL Solutions
16/01/2020
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