How to generate $1000's more in monthly revenue without the overhead of hiring more cashiers
Are you maximizing your restaurant’s profits? With growing labor wages and an industry notorious for high turnover rates, it’s becoming more and more crucial to push your restaurant’s profits as high as possible. One of the easiest ways to do so is to eliminate the short term and long term losses of suboptimal staffing during peak hours.
In this guide, we’re going to show you the 4 steps to generate thousands more in monthly revenue without the stress and burden of hiring more cashiers.
Key Benefits
Increase your monthly profits by thousands of dollars or more
Eliminate the stress and overhead costs of hiring, training, and keeping staff
Reduce negative Yelp reviews like these:
Maybe you have amazing food and a great team behind you, but attracting so many customers has proven to be a double edged sword that’s cutting into your bottom line...
In the short term you have people just straight up ditching the line to go somewhere else the second they see a long line. Those are possible sales, and more importantly, possible repeat customers. That can be a lot of money left on the table!
How about your long term reputation? How can you be sure customers become returning customers? Do you have any negative reviews on Yelp like this?
Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and think about the last time you went out for a quick bite and had to wait in a really long line. Did it leave a bad impression in your head? How many times did you go back after that?
Or think about a time when you wanted to go to one of your favorite lunch spots--did you have second thoughts when you realized it was already too late to beat the lunch rush?
Things like this can easily hurt your brand awareness and lead to poor reviews on Yelp and other review sites. And often it can be hard to bounce back from those low reviews.
So why not just hire more cashiers?
You've probably already dealt with this kind of stress in the past. You know how much of a pain it can be searching for, hiring, and training employees. Maybe you’ve noticed it’s getting harder and harder to find great employees, or maybe you’re in an area with a small employee pool to choose from. You might also be having trouble with shift management - “Can you work weekends” is often met with a “no”, leaving you short-handed during critical times…
Factor in employee turnover rates and rising wages and it's easy to see why this is a problem that’ll keep on growing. Sometimes it's just not cost effective or worth the added effort to hire an extra cashier for only the peak hours of the day (or even off-peak hours!).
Who is this for?
Before you invest any time and energy into this strategy please read this - across all of our clients we’ve found the key to success with this strategy is one of the following:
You’re having trouble keeping up with long queues during lunch rushes, dinner rushes, or weekend rushes.
Your customers are unsatisfied with the amount of time spent waiting in line.
You’re having trouble keeping optimal staff during peak or off-peak hours.
So what’s the strategy all about? In our experience, the easiest way to generate thousands more in monthly revenue without hiring more and more front of house staff is to use self-order kiosks. If you’re having trouble with one of the above, let’s get into the details.
Step 1: Get a self service kiosk solution.
The fact is that a self-service kiosk is the most cost effective way to streamline your point of sale process. You could pick us, you could pick someone else, just pick the kiosk solution that makes the most sense for your business - we make it easy for busy fast casual restaurants and similar businesses to get a premium quality self-service kiosk. The top food chains are adopting it, so why not an independent business like yours?
Don’t get us wrong, we’re not saying you should fully automate your point of sale and replace all of your cashiers with robots (though we do have some clients going with full automation). There’s a balance you need to weigh in that will work best for your business. Plus, there’s a human and social aspect to this that just can’t be replicated - don’t forget we’re in the hospitality industry. Think of KioskBuddy as a tool for your staff to do things that really matter - that might be higher quality food or doubling down on a truly great customer experience.
Step 2: Figure out where to position your kiosk.
Location, location, location.
Just like choosing the perfect location for your restaurant, positioning your kiosk has a huge impact on how useful it is - in fact, it can make or break the whole strategy. If no one notices and uses your kiosk, then you’re not going to get much value out of it.
Keep these things in mind when placing your kiosk:
Place the kiosk in sight of the main queuing area. If you have room, it’s preferable to have the kiosk at or near the main service counter, since customers are already accustomed to placing orders here.
Use a great looking mounting stand. If you’re placing the kiosk on the counter, you can probably skip this step, but when looking for a full size floor mount it’s important to get a high quality one - one that matches the style and branding of your restaurant.
Customize the KioskBuddy idle screen to show your customers what they can do. For example, if you’re a burger shop, use something like “Skip the line, order your burger here!”.
Step 3: Run promotional material to up your kiosk adoption.
One of the quickest and easiest ways to promote your kiosk is to create some posters and signs. You can hang these up somewhere in your location to make your kiosk more apparent. Here are some sample words and phrases to pop on the sign:
Skip the line, order here!
Order Here!
Self Checkout
Self Order
Self Service
If you have a big social media presence, you should take full advantage of it to push your customers’ adoption of the kiosk even further. Run those Instagram stories and get the word out about your brand new kiosk!
Let’s not forget that a well thought out and well executed kiosk will get you brownie points with your customers. Cool new tech is always a hit with the younger generations. By getting yourself a kiosk, you’re ahead of the pack! For example, check out these comments from one of our client’s Instagram posts promoting their new kiosk:
Another quick win to get customers to start using the kiosks right away is to set up temporary promotional discounts. For the first few weeks, you can offer a discount for buying on the kiosk. This gets customers into the habit of using the kiosk down the road, especially if they’re repeat customers that already know exactly what they want. You can easily do this in KioskBuddy with our Promo Codes feature.
Bottom Line
Self-order kiosks are the most cost effective way to streamline your point of sale process, generate revenue, and reduce the burden of hiring staff. Try it out for a few weeks and see for yourself how well it works, if you really perfected your execution there’s no doubt you’ll be seeing a ton of growth in your business!
If you’re still in the market for a self-order kiosk solution, check us out at KioskBuddy. We’re a self-order kiosk app that integrates directly with Square. KioskBuddy works great for fast casual restaurants, popular places that need that little boost to get your revenue to the next level. It’ll also work great for similar places like cafes, dessert shops, and food trucks - not to mention events like festivals, night markets, and fairs.
Ready for your kiosk? Try out KioskBuddy by starting your 30 day free trial.