Tableside Ordering - What's it all about

Tableside ordering…  What’s it all about?

You’ve no doubt seen it in your recent visits to other restaurants and cafes, but if you’re looking for ways to increase and improve customer engagement, improve guest experience and drive greater efficiency in your restaurant or café, you should be looking at tableside ordering technology. 

First things first – Just what are we talking about when we say tableside ordering? Well… there’s 2, quite different, ways to think about tableside ordering.

At Axil Design Co. we consider the 2nd option above as self-service kiosks so, for now, let’s focus on arming your waitstaff with tablets for taking orders.

There are a multitude of benefits for restaurants, bars or cafes in adopting this type of technologies, delivering improvements on costs, efficiencies and also your guests’ experience.

No more physically running hand-written orders to the kitchen or returning to a stationary order-entry point means that of your waitstaff have more time to tend to your customers and deliver abetter guest experience to them and each of them can also handle more tables, delivering areduction in payroll costs.

Direct order entry into tablets meansno more mistakes in the kitchen because the chef can’t read the waiter’s handwriting and also delivers abetter cadence of orders entering the kitchen – Orders hit the kitchen as they’re placed, rather than a waiter taking orders from a number of tables before returning to the station and entering them all at once, bombarding the kitchen or bar.

Moving away from the traditional pad and pen delivers bothcost and environmental benefits with reduced paper and consumable usage – These may seem like small incremental benefits, but they’ll certainly add up over time!

Perhaps the greatest benefit of all in arming your waitstaff with tablets for tableside ordering is areduction in dining time. The faster you can turn your tables, the more guest you’ll be able to serve, and in turn the more revenue you can bring through the door.

Of course, along with these great benefits, there are some key considerations in determining the technologies that you bring into your venue to support tableside ordering.

How will you physically protect your tablets?

Restaurants, cafes and bars are hostile environments for technology. It’s easy for tablets to be dropped, knocked or have food or drinks spilled on them. It’s critical to ensure that your tablets are protected and can stand up to the rigours of daily use in your venue.

Do you want or need to physically secure the tablets for theft prevention?

Whether you’re concerned about security 24/7 or only out of hours when your tablets aren’t being used there are plenty of options. Consider a secure tablet kiosk which can display and secure your tablets in a set location at all times or else secure charging cabinets which allow you to lock your tablets away securely at the end of each shift.

How will you ensure that your tablets are always charged and ready for action before and during each service?

If you’re going to introduce tablets to your venue, you’re going to need to make sure they’re always charged and ready for action… And you don’t want to be relying on waitstaff to have to physically plug in the tablet when they return it to the counter after taking an order. There are a number of options to look at here including secure charging cabinets to charge the devices out of hours or wireless charging dock solutions like our Stoke Wireless Charging Dock.

Stoke Wireless Charging Stand & Case for Galaxy Tab A 10.1”	Flip Mount with Aura Enclosure for iPad 7th gen