When It's Time To Level Up Your Restaurant Technology

Your POS (point of sale) system does a lot for your restaurant. It takes table-side payments, integrates with your online ordering system, manages your payroll and gives you access to all kinds of valuable data. And with today’s all-in-one POS systems, you can also add on tools for managing inventory, taking reservations, running loyalty programs, and more.

So why even bother adding more restaurant operations technology to the mix?

The truth is, your all-in-one POS system can do a lot of things pretty well. By contrast, specialized technology vendors often focus on doing just a few things really well. When you look beyond POS restaurant software, you start to see smart, innovative, and affordable tools that can help your restaurant level up.

Why Should You Look Beyond POS Restaurant Software?

There are a few advantages to looking beyond your POS system for restaurant tech stack upgrades.

• Focus: All-in-one POS systems are built for breadth — providing an incredibly wide range of tools with basic capabilities. On the other hand, specialized tech is built for depth. It provides more varied, advanced, and sophisticated features in specific areas of focus, such as marketing or data management.

• Innovation: Because specialized vendors are laser-focused on a specific area of technology, they are also more likely to invest in cutting-edge advancements related to this focus.

• Customization: Vendors who are more narrowly focused may also offer more customization around your brand, the size of your business, and the scope of your needs.

• Customer service: For more accessible and personalized support in a specific area of your business, a specialized vendor may be able to provide more direct guidance as you look for ways to make the most of your tech.

5 Signs It’s Time for Some Restaurant Tech Stack Upgrades

1. You don’t have a social media strategy. Posting social media content feels time-consuming, inconsistent, and random, and you’re not sure it’s actually translating into customer traffic or sales.
2. Your direct marketing campaigns are falling flat. You aren’t seeing engagement or ROI from your email and text outreach, and you don’t have a lot of data to explain why.
3. You don’t know exactly who your customers are. You have limited visibility into customer segments, behaviors, and preferences. This makes it difficult to build truly effective targeted marketing campaigns.
4. You don’t have channels for personalized engagement. You're having difficulty keeping your brand top-of-mind for customers between visits — and it's costing you the potential for repeat business.
5. Your phone is ringing off the hook. When it gets busy in your restaurant, your phone becomes a source of stress for your employees. It’s also a constant missed opportunity for sales.
   
   

3 Ways To Upgrade Your Tech Stack Right Now

When you're ready to go beyond POS restaurant software, consider adding one of these building blocks to your tech stack.

1. Social Media Marketing and Management Tools

You probably already have access to some solid digital marketing tools through your POS system. But adding a well-chosen social media management platform to the mix can help you create a more impactful social media presence.

The right platform can help you create, schedule, and post content across social media platforms. These are functionalities that you won’t find in a POS system.

Just as importantly, a social media management tool can help you make sense of the data surrounding your digital marketing efforts. You’ll be able to drill down into customer segments, behaviors, and preferences with a lot more detail and nuance.

These are just a few of the things you can do with social media marketing tools:

• Prepare and schedule posts for publishing across multiple platforms
• Get data-driven recommendations on how, when, and where to post content
• Understand and leverage user engagement across platforms
• Customize digital marketing campaigns and monitor your ROI
• Use AI to turn social media “likes,” comments, and messages into business insights

The right social media management system for your restaurant will depend on how much support you need. You have plenty of options, from affordable DIY software all the way up to more costly white-glove services.

2. Email and SMS

Direct marketing through email and SMS is still one of the most effective and affordable ways to connect with your customers. With most POS systems, you’ll need to pay for a higher-tiered subscription or an add-on to incorporate email and SMS into your marketing mix. And even then, you’ll likely run into limitations on design flexibility, customization, and data capture.

This is why a lot of restaurants choose to go with a standalone provider for email and SMS marketing. With the right platform, you’ll get access to a far more dynamic set of tools and features.

You can also get a lot deeper with the data. While your POS system can tell you about order history, SMS and email marketing providers usually provide deeper data-driven insights into things like customer engagement and the behavior of individual customer segments.

With support from a specialized vendor, you can use email and SMS marketing to:

• Manage your email, SMS, and social media inboxes on a single, easy-to-use dashboard
• Automate SMS notifications to customers for things like upcoming reservations or takeout orders that are ready for pickup
• Follow up on customer visits by email and text requesting feedback and encouraging positive review posts
• Use data on customer preferences and behavior to create personalized email promotions and text messages
• Reach out to customers with data-driven special offers and rewards to incentivize return visits

There are also a lot of important rules and regulations when it comes to direct marketing. A reputable SMS marketing platform will help keep you in compliance.

3. AI Phone Systems

AI-powered voice answering technology is becoming increasingly affordable and effective as a growing number of vendors enter the space. And for restaurants that take orders and reservations by phone, this is a restaurant tech stack upgrades with several obvious benefits. AI voice answering:

• Takes calls 24/7
• Handles multiple calls at the same time
• Captures advanced data points with every customer interaction

Some POS systems, like Square, now offer basic AI voice-answering tools. Most other POS systems offer access to more advanced AI voice answering systems through partnerships with specialized vendors. For example, POS provider SpotOn provides AI voice services through a partnership with Loman.ai.

Adding an AI phone system to your tech stack will allow you to:

• Manage multiple calls without ever making guests wait
• Take orders and reservations by phone during pre-shift, after hours, or when the restaurant is just too busy for anybody to answer the phone
• Answer customer questions based on your actual menu
• Handle food orders, manage modifications, and collect payments
• Collect data from customer interactions and use it to identity and act on opportunities for upselling

This type of technology has grown a lot more sophisticated in just the last few years. There may be a learning curve for both your staff and the technology itself as it learns your menu and your brand identity.

But once it’s up and running, your AI-powered voice answering systems can handle a wide range of tasks, including some fairly complicated conversations with human callers.

Staying on the Level

The restaurant tech stack upgrades highlighted above have something in common. Each of these solutions should integrate directly with your POS system. As I mentioned above, these upgrades are building blocks. You already have a strong foundation. Build on this foundation with a few well-chosen pieces of technology.

But don’t stop there. Make sure you know what kind of technology your competitors are using, what strategies other restaurants in your niche are doing to level up, and which innovations are reshaping the restaurant business around us.

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