Hospitality can be a tough industry to work in. On your feet for long hours, places like restaurants and bars can be prone to intensely busy periods. Waiting staff in dine-in restaurants, or staff providing guest services in hotels, can clock up a lot of miles on the average shift. And throughout it all, perhaps working irregular hours, you have to keep your focus on providing the best possible customer service.
A lot has been said and written about the staffing issues facing the UK hospitality industry. 61% of businesses report staff shortages. With those kinds of numbers, anything that can be done to improve conditions and make the job more attractive helps.
One solution we often recommend to hospitality clients is equipping staff with POS tablets and other handheld mobile devices. Mobile POS can make things like table and room service more efficient and accurate. But while this has clear benefits for the customer experience, how this improves the lot of staff, too, often gets overlooked.
So here are five ways mobile POS devices improve working life for hospitality workers.
Easing the Workload
As we’ve said, hospitality can be more physically demanding than people realise. Waiting staff, for example, might end up going back and forth to the same table several times, checking whether a particular dish is still available with the kitchen, fetching the bill and then the card reader.
Mobile POS devices can cut down on these journeys drastically. Connecting to the kitchen management system means staff can look for updates or ask questions right there from the table. They can bring up the bill instantly, and take payment. Mobile POS speeds up transactions and reduces complexity, helping to avoid that stressful feeling of being overwhelmed by your workload.
Reducing Mistakes
Another way mobile POS devices help to reduce stress is by reducing mistakes. With order taking, for example, keying items directly into a tablet that then get directly communicated to the kitchen management system lowers the likelihood of things being missed or scribbles on a piece of paper being misread. Easing and simplifying the workload also keeps staff more mentally alert.
Boosting Customer Relationships
One of the most stressful parts of any customer-facing job is handling customer complaints. By supporting faster, more efficient service and reducing mistakes, mobile POS leads to higher customer satisfaction, and less awkward incidents for staff to navigate. And by helping them handle workloads more efficiently, staff can concentrate on providing the highest standards of service possible. Mobile POS devices can also help directly with that, for example by providing prompts to staff to make targeted recommendations, or answer questions promptly by being able to look up information in real-time.
Increasing Tips
Tipping has long been an important part of hospitality. For employees, a good tip is a double reward. It’s a welcome financial top-up and a sign of a job well done.
The move towards cashless payments has hurt tipping culture, making hospitality a less attractive prospect for workers in the process. But with mobile POS devices, digital tipping is fast and convenient. Tipping can be kept entirely separate from the main bill and allocated to individual staff members.
Improving Employee Retention
Finally, at a time when many hospitality businesses are finding it hard to attract and retain workers, keeping staff happy is just as important as keeping customers happy. By easing the workload, reducing stress, helping employees deliver a higher standard of service to customers, and reap the rewards in the form of digital tips, mobile POS have a role to play in boosting staff morale, and therefore reducing turnover.
To find out more about our POS tablet range, contact the Oxhoo team today.