When you run a fast-casual, quick-service, café, or any restaurant niche that includes drive-thru operations, restaurant speed of service is always a top priority. It’s important to ensure that your customers are served quickly to prevent long lines and disgruntled guests. Since lines at the drive-thru are more visible to the public, consistently long lines at your drive-thru can hurt your reputation and prevent potential customers from visiting your restaurant.
Here are a few ways you can increase your speed of service:
Start From the Ground Up (literally)
Good restaurant speed of service starts with a well-designed drive-thru and a clean layout. If your drive-thru has already been planned out, make sure the landscaping is neat and nothing blocks the view of the menu board.
As for the menu board itself, you want to make sure it is clear and visible. Ideally, you will want the text to be large enough that customers two or three cars down the line can read it. That way, customers can decide what they want ahead of time instead of waiting until they get to the window.
Create Routines and Strategies
Restaurant speed of service requires a system to be set in stone. Make sure you have a routine set for how staff handles drive-thru operations. Train your employees to know the routine by memory, and ensure you have enough staff to properly take care of orders—both at the window and at the counter.
Kitchen display systems are great for prioritizing orders and sending them to the correct prep station. They can also be used to keep track of time so you can set time-service goals, which will help employees stay on track and increase the number of orders that can be fulfilled.
Appoint Troubleshooting Staff
When issues arise during busy hours, it can be difficult to track down managers, since they are often busy with other tasks. Customers don’t want to wait for staff to find higher-ups to fix issues, so it’s a good idea to appoint a seasoned staff member to handle these issues, so they can be resolved quickly and your drive-thru can keep running at full speed.
Implement Tablet Technology
Mobile POS can really increase restaurant speed of service and cut down on the time it takes to navigate a drive-thru lane. When only one order can be taken at a time, your kitchen can’t be optimized. However, when you have long lines and extra hands, you can equip staff with mobile tablets, and let them walk through the line, taking orders from customers so that your kitchen staff can be fully optimized. This provides a face-to-face interaction with the employees taking orders car-side and also decreases the chance for errors. Not only does this increase your restaurant speed of service, but the quality of service as well.
The Winning Combo:
Keeping lines short and customers happy will always be an ongoing battle. Leveraging the right strategies combined with the right technology can give you the upper hand. RPOWER provides technology designed to help improve restaurant speed of service and streamline your operations, so you can deliver the best customer experiences possible. Contact RPOWER today to learn more.