The dust is beginning to settle from the busy season between November and February. Chances are you hired some seasonal employees to help you weather the storm. Now, hopefully, you are starting to settle on a regular crew.
But as Mother’s Day gets closer, you know you need to get your employees trained on your POS system. Being fluent in how to use your POS system empowers your servers to give excellent customer service, allowing you to seat customers quickly and operate your restaurant at peak efficiency.
Here we will go over four reasons why it is vital to establish impactful training and retraining on restaurant POS use.
Start With the Essentials For Restaurant Training
Even if you already provide a comprehensive orientation program for new employees, it is still vital to incorporate a yearly retraining program for existing employees. Bad habits can creep up when employees get in a “just get it done” mode. Without regular training, your team can easily grow to depend on “tribal” knowledge and may miss out on the most useful features of your POS system.
Regular training will create more knowledgeable employees. All teams perform better when everyone knows the responsibilities of their position. Start by clearly defining or redefining the roles of employees.
Eliminate confusion about who is in charge of what and ensure that employees have a way to communicate clearly with each other and with management. By clearly establishing expectations and procedures ahead of time, your staff will feel more comfortable performing when the pressure is on. These training sessions also present an excellent opportunity to provide tips for encouraging collaboration among newbies and old hands.
New employees should be assigned a mentor or trainer. This provides a two-fold benefit by giving excellent hands-on experience for the new employee while learning under the protective wing of a more experienced member of your staff. It also empowers your best employees by giving them an additional sense of responsibility and a stake in the success of the restaurant.
Create Better Customer Experiences
Once you have covered the basics, it’s time to move on to point-of-sale training. Your employees must learn the techniques and processes by which your business operates. Getting stuck waiting for a POS terminal to enter orders takes time your servers could be spending on more valuable work functions.
If your employees don’t know how to use your POS system, they can make errors costing your business valuable time and money and aggravating your customers. But if they are well versed in your system, they could help boost future sales by doing things such as taking advantage of integrated customer loyalty programs or offering upsells and making suggestions. The point is your employees need time on your POS system to practice how to use it well.
Create a Faster Speed of Service
During the lunch and dinner rush hours, everyone needs to know how to play their part to keep things moving. A smooth terminal experience with a user-friendly interface and functionality will help your new employees catch on quickly.
Employing a POS system that is customizable to fit your needs will help your employees learn its functionality more quickly. An intuitive step-by-step ordering process will help even newbies easily figure out how to perform functions like charging for add-on items without slowing down on busy nights.
Another way to create even faster customer service is by placing tablets in your server’s hands. This way, orders are going directly from the table to the kitchen. Tablets can reduce errors in translation from what the customers tell your servers to what gets written down and entered into the POS Terminal. Increased accuracy improves productivity and reduces send-backs.
Increase Every-Day Productivity
Whether your restaurant is table service or quick service, POS system training can increase productivity in many ways. A good restaurant POS system can improve productivity by creating order types for the bar, dining rooms, patio, or wherever you need them. Make it easy to transfer payments between the bar and table and also combine or separate checks at the bar and in the dining room. Make sure your staff knows how to do so quickly.
It’s an old business adage that the metrics we measure get improved. Adding timestamps to the various steps in your order fulfillment process will help you collect the data you need to measure the speed of service. User-friendly screen-ordering for updating orders and payment processing can make sure your staff is not wasting time trying to find the right buttons to push but moving quickly on to more high-value tasks.
Creating Smoother Operations For Online Ordering
The restaurant business is hectic and stressful. The stress seems to continually increase. In the old days, the stress on your kitchen staff could at least be limited to the number of people you could physically fit in your restaurant.
But now, customers have fully embraced online ordering, and take-out and delivery are a mainstay for normal restaurant operations. Having a system that tracks all incoming orders in a way that is easy for your kitchen staff to understand and follow can make the difference between a successful night and one lost in the weeds.
For this, you need an online ordering tool and kitchen video systems (KVS) that work together flawlessly. When these two systems are in sync, orders are automatically routed to the specific prep stations in the kitchen. You can reduce or eliminate the human error of lost tickets by getting rid of those little pieces of paper.
POS training for new and experienced employees can help them understand the process of online ordering and customer experiences so they can better prepare and succeed within the workflow. When the front and back of the house are trained together, you will have a highly efficient team that can work together no matter what challenges arise.
Conclusion
Now is the perfect time for you to revamp your business’s training system. Old and new employees will benefit from regular reminders of how lines of communication should work. Training on how to use your POS system when your restaurant is in a lull will pay off many times over when you are in the thick of busy shifts and processes are still running smoothly. And if you are wondering how you can make this all happen in your restaurant, wonder no more. Contact an NCC Reseller today and get your team trained up in time for Mother’s Day.
