Restaurant Order Throttling: Balance On and Off-Premise Dining
No one wants to wait too long for their food. Caitlin didn’t need a restaurant expert to tell her that. No one took the guest experience more seriously than her. So when her restaurant’s cook times and customer satisfaction measures started slipping, she acted. The problem wasn’t always clear. Taking orders from the website and feeding them into her kitchen workflow seemed like a great idea. However, blending the dual streams of guest traffic, those in and off-site, proved trickier in practice. Their point of sale system took the orders, those from online and in-store, without considering capacity management or the current workflow in the restaurant. Off-premise orders weighed equally with those on-site and crowded out in-store diners as the POS processed them. As a result, guests inside saw bloated wait times as the kitchen became overwhelmed with online orders. Caitlin’s restaurant needed a solution that could combine the two guest experiences, without one negatively affecting the other. Enter ConnectSmart® Kitchen and smart data. CSK measures every process in the restaurant, from the kitchen to the floor, generating the most accurate quote times in the industry. Utilizing a process called “order throttling,” it keeps things paced smoothly. Now, off-premise guests receive quotes based on the real-time activities of the kitchen. When the restaurant floods with guests, CSK extends the off-premise quote. Once things cool off, those pickup quotes update to reflect it. These guests get an accurate time and aren’t forced to wait; they know precisely when to come in. With the best in class kitchen display system on board, their processes run on smart, real-time data. Those dining in aren’t affected by online orders. The staff doesn’t waste food or effort in fixing mistakes. Everyone wins! Check out the video below to see how the process can work at your restaurant, in real-time.Subscribe to the blog for more interesting restaurant content!
Dylan Chadwick is a Content Marketing Specialist at QSR Automations. He graduated from Brigham Young University with an English degree and journalism focus and loves to write about technology. When left to his own devices, he enjoys loud music, adorable dogs and documentaries about the aforementioned.
[…] Restaurant demand varies wildly throughout the day and by day of week. At times, demand is so high that the kitchen can’t keep up. Rather than taking the risk of dissatisfying customers whose orders can’t be fulfilled in a timely fashion, some operators turn off (throttle) some of their distribution channels (i.e. online orders, takeout orders) to reduce demand to a manageable level. Throttling has become so widespread that it’s even offered by providers such as Olo, Toast, and QSR Automations. […]