The days of taking orders by pen and paper are all but gone. Nowadays, you walk into any restaurant and you’ll likely see one or more point of sale units instead. This progress is a great thing, but it means that you need to shift your focus as a restaurant owner or manager trying to optimize operations.
With technology playing a bigger role, you may want to turn your sights toward an important consideration for the restaurant industry right now: technical support. The quality of support available to you has a major influence on your overall performance and can indirectly impact everything from sales to company expansion. Here’s what you need to know about support and why it is crucial for your restaurant.
Better Technical Support Means Better Customer Service
Take off your owner hat for a second and think about this topic from a customer’s perspective. How frustrating is it when you go to a place that specializes in something like ice cream and you find out that their ice cream machine is having technical issues? You’re practically guaranteed to walk away from the store with a negative feeling, no matter how friendly the staff is or how fast they serve you, all because you didn’t get what you wanted.
That’s why having sufficient support is so essential to your restaurant. If something happens with your POS or other equipment, it is going to frustrate your customers to no end. So in many ways, having good technical support service is the best form of customer service that you can have. This is incredibly important in an industry where 54% of consumers have increasingly higher customer service expectations.
When Your POS Goes Down, Sales Go Down
How long does it take you to manually enter an order through your POS system? 10 to 15 seconds? Maybe even less? And if you have the proper channels set up in order to integrate online orders with your POS, those orders don’t take any time at all, because your customers enter them themselves.
However, if that technology was to stop working, you’d suddenly have to resort to manually entering every order, possibly even being forced to use pen and paper to do so. This could easily double or even triple the time it takes to process a single order. So every second that goes by where you don’t have full access to your POS system means even more potential sales are being lost.
“Everyone who complains to me at meetings, I tell them that they have no idea how tough it can be because they were never on the ground on a Friday night trying to fix POS issues.” - Frank Prainito, Jet’s Pizza
When you have good support available to your stores, you can help minimize the risk of having any of your technology go down. That means no more worrying about whether or not your system is going to be able to make it through a busy Friday night without any issues.
Support Allows You to Focus Your Attention on Other Things
Do you really want to have to spend time updating your POS or completing menu changes on your online store? Probably not. As an owner or manager, you have a lot on your plate and while essential, these technical tasks should not be crowding it.
“I don’t have the time to do stuff like updates. So anything that I can give to a tech company to handle is good.” - Jennifer Hill, Jet’s Pizza
By using services like SpeedLine Premiere Support, you are able to hand these tasks off to a qualified support team. Plus, if something does happen with any of your technology, you can focus on managing employees or handling customers, rather than diverting attention toward fixing the technical issue.
Pizza Support is Unique Support
A common mistake made by restaurateurs is that they have a narrow scope when evaluating potential support services. While reviews from both current and past clients are obviously important, it is not the only or even the most important thing to look at. For example, you should be looking at what industries they provide their services to. The more specific the support, the better, as this usually means the technician you talk to will be trained in-depth on the product you need help with.
As a pizza restaurant, you need someone who understands the specifics of the problems that you typically face. Being a generic restaurant support service isn’t good enough anymore. In order to help you optimize your performance, increase sales, and minimize operational headaches, you need support that specializes in serving the needs of the pizza industry.
The perfect example of this is the challenges surrounding pizza delivery. Nowadays, it’s much more than just writing an address on a piece of paper and handing it off to a delivery driver. Many pizza restaurants often have a comprehensive delivery system and designated dispatch station where someone is stationed to help manage deliveries and setup optimal routes for drivers. When using SpeedLine and LiveMaps, this delivery process involves the ability to also locate which delivery zone an address is in and also send directions to the delivery driver’s phone. All of these functionalities require very specific kinds of support that only a pizza-oriented support team can help you with.
"My SpeedLine tech was quick and knowledgeable, he knew exactly what help I needed and how to guide me through the process of resolving my issue." - Lindsey Estes, Minsky’s Pizza
By finding a pizza-specific support team with a good reputation, you can help to improve everything from sales to customer reviews. In many ways, it’s the secret to creating a thriving pizza empire nowadays. Make your search for the perfect support service easier by learning about SpeedLine Support Services.
