Imagine you have bought a brand new SUV. The predominant expectations from the car would be enriched comfort, exceptional speed, and enhanced features. But, what would be your basic expectation? Excellent mileage. And what determines a car’s mileage? The efficiency of its engine.
The perception of a restaurant is quite similar. A delightful customer experience is a consequence of optimal restaurant efficiency. If you’re wondering how to achieve that, I encourage you to read on.
What is restaurant efficiency?
Restaurant efficiency refers to the optimal utilization of a restaurant’s resources to generate the highest productivity, while simultaneously decreasing the costs, human capital and operation time involved. A better restaurant efficiency results in higher profitability – desired by every restaurateur on the planet.
By increasing efficiency, restaurants can witness improved customer experience, an increase in customer footfalls, positive word-of-mouth marketing, and ultimately, a stable business growth.
The 4 most important factors which influence a restaurant’s efficiency are:
- Order processing speed
- Staff communication
- Inventory management
- Customer service and feedback management
Ways to improve restaurant efficiency
Order processing management
Improving the speed of processing orders is one of the most important ways to improve restaurant efficiency. Along with ensuring a significant reduction in the turnaround time, it directly influences the customer experience and profitability of the restaurant.
You can enhance the order processing speed with the following methods:
- Minimize time lag incurred for sending an order from the table to the kitchen by adopting kitchen display systems. This saves ample time that your steward or waiter spends shuttling between the customer and the chef.
- Invest in a POS system that enables you to manage multiple kitchen order tickets (KOTs) easily. Managing KOTs is an essential process to increase restaurant efficiency. An additional feature that aids your wait staff is the capability to edit KOTs on the go, to make quick alterations to customers’ orders.
- Enabling cashless payments through integration with multiple payment gateways helps in settling bills right at the table, resulting in a faster checkout process.
Staff communication
Proper communication is the glue that holds the staff together. Ensuring effective communication between the front-of-house staff (i.e., your wait staff, receptionists etc.) and back-of-house staff (i.e., your kitchen staff, inventory managers etc.) results in a positive work experience, reduces any margin for error, boosts group morale, and improves the productivity of your restaurant staff.
Here are a few tips to optimize staff communication:
- Provide proper education and training to your staff, regarding the roles and responsibilities of each person. Encourage the growth of an empathetic culture.
- Create a cross-training module for your staff. This provides an insight on the duties of each role, and trains your staff to take up additional responsibility at any point of the day.
- Adopt good table management procedures. This will help in monitoring the productivity of your wait staff. It also leads to the prevention of unnecessary quarrels.
- Design an employee training manual covering all the important aspects of your restaurant. Include detailed sections on policies, roles, rules and regulations, and conflict resolution mechanisms.
- Schedule pre-service and post-service staff meetings. Motivate your staff during the pre-service meeting, and appreciate their efforts during the post-service meeting. Communicate the challenges faced during the day along with their optimal solutions. This cultivates a culture of trust and mutual growth.
- Establish a rewards and recognitions program to recognize your staff’s efforts.
Inventory Management
Managing a restaurant’s inventory with utmost care and precision can greatly influence its efficiency. Inventory management encompasses the planning, monitoring and controlling of raw ingredients, semi-finished and finished menu items, as well as the ancillaries in a restaurant (such as cutlery, packaging material, etc.).
To increase restaurant efficiency through inventory management:
- Keep an accurate check on your ingredient inventory and monitor its freshness and quantity.
- Use your sales reports to predict the optimal production quantity. This leads to utilization of the right quantity of ingredients, and allows you to stock up accordingly.
- Label your ingredients carefully, and store them based on categories. Also, assign unique inventory IDs for each ingredient to optimize your tracking mechanisms.
- Employ seasonal stocking. Check for ingredients that are available in a particular season and create menu items based on the same. As a result, you will be able to reduce procurement costs.
- Employ proper wastage monitoring mechanisms. This helps in reducing wastage costs, ensuring that you don’t run out of certain menu items.
To know more about how to manage inventory efficiently, utilize this checklist.
Customer service and feedback management
Customer is the king, and that’s the anthem we sing. Providing impeccable customer service, along with constructive feedback management, improves the restaurant’s perception amongst the public. Inculcating proper etiquette helps the restaurant staff to serve customers quicker, which directly influences restaurant efficiency.
Here are a few suggestions to ensure good customer service and productive feedback management:
- While serving customers, train your stewards and waiters to follow appropriate etiquette:
- They must talk to the customers in an amicable manner. Wear a smile, till the last mile.
- They must pay attention to the customer without being meddlesome. Have a keen eye, but never pry.
- They must accommodate guests promptly, even if the party is missing a member. Never say no, even if someone’s solo.
- They must serve from the guest’s left side and clear plates from the guest’s right side. You must abide by the rules of each side.
- They must never touch a customer for any reason whatsoever. Even a friendly tap is an inevitable trap.
- Inform your customers about the wait time by providing realistic estimates. Keep them engaged while they wait by designing recreational spaces.
- Encourage customers to voice out their concerns with complete liberty. This will help you identify the gaps in service quality and find the solution to prevent such issues in the future.
- Apologize immediately when a customer complains about a particular issue. Ensure that you understand the root cause of the problem – addressing it can help you increase restaurant efficiency.
Adopt Gofrugal POS to minimize efficiency loss
Operational efficiency in restaurants is a crucial area of focus, and with the need for automation in a restaurant’s operation cycle – investing in a restaurant POS software is inevitable.
Gofrugal’s Restaurant POS software serves as the ideal engine for your restaurant – catalyzing your hard work and effort to fuel your business on the path towards profitability and success. Here’s how Gofrugal’s Restaurant POS software is designed to bolster your restaurant efficiency:
- Simple user interface that requires the least training and minimal skills to operate.
- Real-time customer feedback management with empirical reports that generate valuable insights.
- Integration with ServJoy, an order-taking app with features to record and edit KOTs, and settle bills right at the table.
- Inventory management modules with complete automation for operations such as recipe management, wastage management, and ingredient stock management.
- Provision to design online menus for you to enable contactless dining at your restaurant.
Achieving optimal restaurant efficiency is no longer a pipe dream, rather a child’s play. Acquiring the right technology like Gofrugal’s Restaurant POS software maximizes efficiency with minimum human effort involved – like cruising in an SUV on a highway.
When it comes to boosting restaurant efficiency, we have the preferred proficiency.
