The modern POS is a platform that can help accurately assess sales performance, productivity efficiencies, inventory, customer satisfaction and staffing. Here's how to choose the right one.

June 10, 2022 | by Chris Lybeer — Chief Strategy Officer, Revel Systems

The restaurant industry is currently fraught with recruitment and labor issues. With the added pressure of inflation, which is at a 40-year-high, merchants must find the right productivity tools to efficiently power their business. Though many believe the point of sale (POS) is just a basic tool for processing payments, the modern POS is a platform that can help accurately assess sales performance, productivity efficiencies, inventory, customer satisfaction and staffing. In fact, investment in a flexible, cloud-native POS is critical to meet the changing needs of consumers whose demands for restaurant services are at an all-time high. Modern POS systems are also easier and faster to install, and have a lower TCO than legacy client server solutions.

As with any industry, price is generally top-of-mind when comparative shopping for a POS. While price remains an important consideration when choosing a POS, it shouldn't be the driving factor in your decision for good reason. What's important to know is that price differentials across vendors are not substantial; often they range $5-75 per month. At the end of the day, if one system costs, say $40 more per month than another, but it solves more business problems, experiences fewer system outages and has better support, that additional cost will be well worth it. A system with more down time, with poor support, that doesn't regularly release new features will cost you far more than that. Buy the best system. It will help you keep great customers, drive more revenue, and more than pay for itself.

Hence, it's critical that restaurateurs weigh both the savings and benefits of their desired platform from a holistic point-of-view. For example, the advanced feature sets with robust integrations of a comprehensive and flexible POS might serve you better now and in years to come as opposed to a closed solution. In the same way that your mobile phone comes with integrated security features and productivity apps that are constantly updated and improved to provide the optimal experience, the modern POS is equipped to be a constantly evolving transactional platform that can quickly adapt to the changing needs of the restaurant industry landscape.

When evaluating a POS platform, restaurateurs should look beyond the software and zero in on the terms of the partnership. Will your POS partner be with you every step of the way as you grow your business? The right partner will do a thorough discovery process (spend weeks or months getting you set up perfectly) with you, whereby they interview key stakeholders across the company. Marketing, store operators, and technologists are all key in customizing the platform to help meet the demands of the operation.

Also, will your POS provider offer the level of customer support necessary when troubleshooting arises? After all, no matter the time of day or day of the week, restaurant operators are busy addressing front-of-house and back-of-house needs, leaving little time for system administration.

With today's POS serving as the heartbeat for business operations, access to 24/7 support is table stakes for any restaurant. In this case, it's important to have white-glove support and a dedicated account team that can help free up time and attention for you to focus on other tasks. Downtime in the form of an outage can be detrimental if not addressed in the right amount of time and if it happens frequently. The days in which your POS is offline can equate to thousands of dollars in lost revenue over time. Couple this with sneaky hidden costs like high processing fees and suddenly the spend on your POS becomes very costly.

Restaurateurs should think about a future-proofed platform when determining the best POS for their business. Hospitality environments demand greater flexibility that can keep pace with consumer demands and ever-changing appetites. Merchants are seeking mission-critical data from anywhere and at any time to make data-driven decisions for their businesses.

Rewind to pre-pandemic and almost 90 percent of transactions were rung up at a POS. Fast forward to today and there's been a sea change in how and where customer transactions are conducted. Mobile apps, online desktop ordering, mobile order takers, drive-thrus and self-service kiosks have come to dominate the current transaction landscape. The best architecture that can support this trend is a cloud-native one. It simply grows with you; whatever needs you have now might be obsolete in just a few years depending on how far your business has scaled. Market forces might also factor into how well your POS fares.

For restaurateurs managing a multi-location business, choosing a POS that offers the right mix of functionality, features, and scalability will help effectively manage a growing business while delighting and securing customers along the way.

Revel Systems is an intuitive Point of Sale and platform that integrates inventory management, employee management, sales reporting, and more into a single platform.

Subscribe now to the Restaurant Operator Daily, which brings you the top stories from Fast Casual, Pizza Marketplace, and QSR Web.

Already a member? Sign in below.

sign in  or register now

You may sign into this site using your login credentials from any of these Networld Media Group sites: