Seven incredible benefits of using self-service kiosks in your restaurant

3. Increase throughput

People queuing round the corner to buy your food might feel good, but the reality is it’s probably costing you sales.

81% of customers find restaurant queues frustrating, with 61% admitting they’d leave and go elsewhere if they had to wait more than 10 minutes. In the traditional QSR set-up, taking orders often becomes an operational bottleneck, limiting takings during peak hours. Self service kiosks increase order-taking capacity exponentially; reducing wait times, attracting more customers and allowing operators to take more orders than through an EPOS.

Smart use of kiosks can cut queues by up to 50% and reduce the risk of losing customers to the back of the queue during peak hours.

4. Improve order accuracy

With the customer in control of inputting their order, there is less risk of time-strapped cashiers mishearing or misinterpreting an order, reducing overall margin for error. This is vital for customers with allergies.

5. Customers enjoy using self order kiosks

87% of customers said they feel more relaxed ordering at a kiosk which means they’re less pressured to make rushed decisions. People take their time when ordering on kiosks and are more likely to look through the full menu, adding customisations and extras without fear of perceived judgement.

6. Use your self service kiosks to capture loyalty

Kiosks aren’t just powerful tools for processing orders.

The best brands are thinking about how kiosks play a role in their broader omnichannel strategy. Today’s consumers want a consistent experience across multiple channels, and the flexibility to choose the right channel at the right time. By integrating kiosks into your wider ecosystem, you get valuable data on how your customers are behaving across different ordering channels. Capturing that data enables you to create personalised and targeted promotions for your customers, increasing loyalty and overall customer spend.

7. Self service kiosks help you remain agile

Kiosk screens are designed to be easily customised with plug & play connections, including ePDQs, QR code scanners, and other devices that ‘snap on’ to the side of the kiosk. This massively increases flexibility for operators – restaurants can adapt their kiosk solution without having to buy new hardware. It also enables operators to be more agile, as new functionality can be live in days and weeks, rather than months.

How do kiosks fit into your tech stack?

Self-service kiosks provide significant value to any business.

But to take full advantage of their potential, operators need to consider how kiosks fit into their tech ecosystem.

Tech innovation has opened up a variety of new revenue channels, provided by individual point solutions. But these point solutions focus on just one part of the order management process, bolted onto an existing POS.

This results in a ‘Frankentech stack’ of integrations, which have a profound effect on business growth, operational stability and guest experience.

The solution?

An order management system

Winning restaurant brands now manage their order process with a new approach.

One that moves away from complicated, time-consuming point solutions and embraces the reliability of a single order management system.

Digital ordering, POS, omnichannel loyalty, menu management and data: all handled in one system that doesn’t depend on a complicated web of integrations. By taking and fulfilling 100% of orders in one system, you’ll be able to create a consistent guest experience and boost the performance of your restaurant brand.

This new approach is crucial in launching and managing valuable new order channels – such as kiosks – quickly, easily, and without hours of manual admin.

Find out more about how an order management system can help you launch and manage new order channels easily in our guide right here.