Keeping your customers happy is one of the most important aspects of running a business. Whether you run an e-commerce business or a restaurant, a hair salon or a retail store, satisfied customers are more likely to become repeat customers. And one of the best ways to improve the customer experience is to ensure a high order accuracy rate.
Accurate order fulfillment in a restaurant business is particularly important. Your diners won’t come into your place of business if they aren’t getting the food they ordered. If you eliminate inaccurate orders, you’ll likely boost customer satisfaction and could even increase your profit margins.
If you need help with your order accuracy and aren’t sure where to begin, you’ve come to the right place. We’ll examine why it is essential and provide handy tips and tools to help you reduce your error rate and ensure a better customer experience.
Your order accuracy is the proportion of customer orders that are processed correctly. Ensuring a high order accuracy rate is vital to running a restaurant.
Having accurate orders means you’ll have higher levels of customer satisfaction. This, in turn, could lead to increased customer loyalty and better customer retention. Satisfied customers are more likely to return to your restaurant repeatedly. In fact, a study on customer restaurant choices revealed that personal experience with a restaurant was the third most important factor influencing restaurant choice.
A better customer experience can also lead to positive reviews, which could bring in new customers for your business. In contrast, if customers receive an incorrect order, they’re more likely to have a bad experience, leave a negative review, and deter potential new customers from coming in.
More accurate orders can also help you reduce waste in your restaurant. If you cook and serve wrong orders, the food will be thrown away, and you’ll have to use more of your inventory to prepare the correct dish.
Ensuring you have a high order accuracy rate can boost your bottom line by increasing your customer base and cutting down on wastage.
Your order accuracy rate is an important metric that can help you measure your order accuracy ... well, accurately. It’s a key performance indicator (also known as a KPI) that can show you how well your restaurant operates.
To measure your order accuracy rate, divide the number of orders processed accurately by the total number of orders, then multiply by 100 to get a percentage.
For example, if you processed 450 orders correctly out of a total of 600 orders, you would divide 450 by 600 to get a value of 0.75. Multiply this by 100 to get a final order accuracy rate of 75%. This means that you processed the wrong order 25% of the time — and there’s definitely room for improvement!
If you want to increase order accuracy in your restaurant business, automation can help. There are various tools available that could improve your order fulfillment process and reduce wrong orders.
A suitable point-of-sale (POS) system can simplify various aspects of your restaurant management, including order accuracy.
A POS system works with order processing software to help process payments. It also lets you track your sales over a given time frame, meaning you can see what items are most popular. This enables you to keep an eye on your inventory and ensure you have the most popular ingredients in stock when needed, reducing the need for swap-outs and ensuring your chef team has everything they need to produce a correct order.
Another way of keeping an eye on your stock levels (and, therefore, improving your order accuracy) is with inventory management software.
This type of software lets you see your inventory levels in real time. It can also help with your supply chain management, as some types of software can automatically order ingredients when they’re running low.
Self-service devices can be instrumental in optimizing your order management and improving your order accuracy rate.
For example, an app like KioskBuddy lets customers place and pay for their orders through a tablet instead of with a server or member of your front-of-house (FOH) team. This can reduce the risk of a server mishearing or misunderstanding a customer’s order, as the customers choose their food themselves, directly from a digital menu.
The device can also help eliminate the errors associated with handwritten tickets. If your servers are in a hurry, they might scribble down the order and make it too difficult for your chefs to read, increasing the likelihood of a wrong order. With KioskBuddy, you can print paper tickets with clearly legible orders or synchronize orders with a kitchen display screen (see below).
A kitchen display screen (KDS) is another valuable tool to help reduce order inaccuracies.
Whether your staffers process orders on a POS or your customers order their food through a self-service kiosk, the order goes straight through to the KDS. Chefs can instantly see what needs cooking on the screen. They can then click through the processes to ensure they’re making the right food for the right table.
A KDS is more reliable than paper tickets, which can easily get lost or damaged in a busy kitchen environment. A KDS lets your back-of-house (BOH) team see incoming orders in real time.
Still worried about your order accuracy rate? Here are a couple of bonus tips to help you further reduce inaccuracies.
If you want to improve your workflow optimization and reduce order processing errors in your restaurant, setting up a straightforward and efficient ordering system is crucial. It will ensure your staffers know who is responsible for each step of the order process and can allow you to add a quality-check stage before your orders go out to the customer.
Follow this step-by-step system to improve order accuracy in your self-service restaurant:
A customer places their order on a self-service device.
The order goes through to the KDS.
The BOH team sees the order and marks it as begun on the KDS.
The chef or cooks prepare the order.
The head chef performs a quality check to ensure the food is made according to the order (e.g., with the correct side dish or without a specific allergen present).
The BOH team plates or packages the order for delivery/takeout, ensuring it’s adequately labeled (if leaving the restaurant premises).
The BOH team marks the order as ready on the KDS.
An FOH staffer performs another quality check to ensure the order is correct and they know which table or takeout customer it’s going to.
A food runner takes the food to the customer.
The customer enjoys their food with a smile!
It’s a good idea to measure your order accuracy rate regularly so you can keep an eye on how things are going. Once calculated, you can use your current order accuracy rate as a benchmark to help you see whether things are improving or worsening.
Even when reaping the rewards of accurate orders, it’s still worth measuring the rate once a month or once per quarter to ensure you maintain your new high standards.
Another way to help increase your order accuracy could be to offer incentives to staffers working to reduce inaccuracies in customer orders. You could run competitions to see which shift has the best order accuracy rate, with prizes such as a cash bonus or a food voucher for the winning team.
KioskBuddy makes it easy to send the right food out to diners in your restaurant. Customers place their orders themselves, meaning you reduce the risk of your FOH team mishearing the order or sending an illegible paper ticket through to your chefs.
Sign up for KioskBuddy and enjoy a 30-day free trial.