Thank your hospitality operation's waitstaff with better FOH hospitality technology tools!

To celebrate National Waitstaff Day I figured I write a few things regarding hospitality technology...more specifically technology that FOH staff typically engage with. We're talking POS (point of sale), reservations/seating management, and coworker scheduling. Just for a minute, think about all the people who serve you food and drinks. Now put yourself in their hopefully very comfortable shoes.

 

There are tons of options out there. In my own experience, I worked with a bunch...including Aloha, Revel, Square, Vend, & Compass Technologies in the POS space. Zomato Book/Nextable for table management and reservations. 7Shifts in the coworker scheduling arena. Omnivore for hospitality tech unification.   

 

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GoodBetterBest Takeaways

 

Tools need operators & more

Remember these are just digital tools. Your restaurant is not staffed by robots (yet). You still need to have good processes, better team engagement, and the best leadership behind those tools for full effectiveness. 

Engage your team

While you can't democratize every decision regarding ultimate tool selection, do involve your team. Adoption of new technology will be easier if you actually involve your coworkers to gain feedback. They probably know the ins and out of daily FOH duties better than you do, so make use of that valuable feedback. 

Be data-informed, not data-driven

Consider the openness of the tools. By openness, I mean the ability to easily integrate with other hospitality tools and see/use the data to be data-informed in your business. If you have non-integrated tools, it's more challenging to collect your data from various sources and make real sense of it all. Also, listen to your data, but don't ignore your own experience either. The ultimate goal is to improve the "guest experience"...so having great tools to support both your patrons AND your waitstaff will go a long way to improving your bottom line.