Restaurant self-service kiosks have continued to grow in popularity over the past few years and with good reason. Customer behaviour has changed with many now actively searching for restaurants that provide a self-service option. 95% of Gen Z customers, for example, prefer self-ordering at kiosks to ordering in-person at the till.
Appealing to your customers is a very good reason for your restaurant to make use of self-service kiosks. However, self-service kiosks can also help you to optimise your restaurant. The data you can collect from your self-service solution will inform you of when your peak times actually are, which items are currently being ordered the most and which is the best location in your restaurant to place your kiosk.
Keep reading to find out exactly how you can optimise your business with a restaurant self-service kiosk, or talk with our team about your self-service kiosk project today!
Popular items
The data collected by your self-service kiosk and the software you use will help you identify which menu items are currently in high demand with your customers.
This informs you what it is your customers are currently demanding from your restaurant. With this information, you can optimize your advertising by focusing on your most popular items. This will help you to encourage your customers to continue ordering the in-demand product. As well as this, you’ll be reinforcing the idea that if your customers want that item, they need to return to your restaurant.
Your self-service kiosk will also be able to help with this as you’ll be able to take advantage of the digital screen and promote your popular items to customers as they select their meals. This will help you to make the most out of the current demand for popular products.
This can also work effectively for menu items that you have noticed are not particularly popular and you’d like to see an increase in their sales. Knowing this information you can then focus promotions around these products, encouraging customers to try them and order them more frequently, increasing their sales.
Another way that this data can help to optimize your restaurant is that you’ll know which ingredients you’ll need to have in high supply. For example, if your most popular item is a beef burger, you’d know to make sure that your restaurant constantly has a healthy supply of buns, beef patties and burger sauce. Running low would result in a loss of sales as your restaurant would not be able to keep up with the demand for this popular item. You’ll also know which ingredients you won’t require as much of so you won’t waste money replenishing those stocks as frequently.
Every restaurant is different, however, the food cost percentage typically falls anywhere between 20 to 40%. Knowing which ingredients you don’t need as much because their menu items aren’t selling well, means you can transition the money spent on those ingredients to ingredients that do sell well. This will allow you to reduce your restaurant’s operating costs and increase your returns.
Contact LamasaTech today and we’ll help you to implement self-service kiosks in your restaurant.
Peak times
This data will inform you when your self-service kiosks are being used the most. You can optimize your restaurant with this data by scheduling more members of staff to work at these times. Doing this will allow the staff and the kiosks to share the high volume of customers which will keep queues down and maintain a positive customer experience. Keeping your waiting times down is essential in maintaining your customers, in fact, most customers are only willing to wait 14 minutes before being served. As well as this businesses have reported that they lost 75% of customers due to waiting times.
Knowing your peak times and scheduling the appropriate number of staff to be working those times can therefore help you to keep your customers from leaving and also encourage them to return in the future thanks to your shorter waiting times.
Again this works for the other end of the scale as you’ll also know when you can have fewer members of staff working which will help reduce your overall costs and leave you with a more optimised restaurant.
Kiosk placement
Your restaurant may have multiple self-service kiosks for your customers to use or just one, but finding the right location is one of the top challenges businesses face when deploying self-service kiosks. By trying different locations in your restaurant for your self-service kiosks you’ll be able to pinpoint the optimal spot that generates the most sales. For example, you may place your kiosk close to the entrance, then next to the till payment point and then to one side of the restaurant. You’ll be able to compare how many orders and the size of the sales the kiosk achieved in each location, helping you to understand which is the best for your restaurant.
Typically a self-service kiosk will achieve the most sales in a high-traffic location, such as close to the entrance or near the payment point.
This optimization will allow you to reach the highest number of customers and encourage them to make the biggest purchases.
Effective ads and upsells
The digital screen on your kiosk allows you to present more than just purchasing options. You can showcase various adverts for your products as customers purchase their meals. This allows you to encourage them to make additional purchases or to upgrade to a more expensive menu item. For example, you could have an upsell that encourages your customers to make their single-item order a “combo meal”.
You’ll be able to track which of your digital adverts that appear on your self-service kiosks are the most effective and have led to additional sales or item upgrades. This is an opportunity you should take advantage of because successful and effective upselling can increase your average order sizes by 15%-20%.
Ready to add the benefits of a self-service kiosk to your restaurant?
We’d love to hear about your project, so get in touch and we’ll help you find the best solution for your restaurant.
LamasaTech is a leader in digital display technology with over 12 years of experience. We support customers across a range of industries including retail, military and defence, government and public sector, technology, hospitality and education.
