With everyone feeling the financial burden of the COVID-19 pandemic, Kitchen Display Systems, or KDS, might seem like an unnecessary additional expense. However, KDS actually improve kitchen efficiency so you can handle more orders and improve accuracy and satisfaction. In times like these, we could all use an easy solution for bolstering the bottom line.
How do KDS work?
These display screens eliminate the need for tickets. They reduce reduce paper waste and have the additional benefit of allowing kitchen staff to see the whole queue, including how long each item has been on there. This ensures customers get their dishes in a timely manner and also reduces human error, greatly improving overall order accuracy. Considering how much of poor customer satisfaction stems from incorrect orders, and how much customer satisfaction affects future sales, this is a major perk of using KDS.
They update in real-time when someone correct or adds to an order so customers can get any alterations fixed quickly and easily. They also work together with front and back of house printers to send receipts to the correct station.
Do orders really come out faster?
Yes, for two reasons: Firstly, KDS helps ensure that the entire meal goes out together, so servers don’t spend time going back and forth to the kitchen to ask for that forgotten side salad. Timestamps and digitization also make sure that orders get filled in the sequence they come in, reducing customer wait time across the board. This also helps managers determine how long customers will wait on any given day or at any given time, which allows them to make decisions about staff and optimization. It also lets staff give realistic expectations to customers.
These KDS also allow cooks to group orders together. Let’s use a side order of fries to conceptualize this better:
Say that six people in queue all want this same side. With paper tickets, cooks would have to make six individual orders of fries, wait for them to finish cooking and start all over again. This wastes a lot of time that they could better spend handling other orders. Meanwhile with a KDS, chefs would see that six people wanted the same side and they could make one huge order of fries to dole out into six containers. This significantly reduces the total time spent on making fries and helps all six customers get their side orders sooner.
Improve pick-up and delivery
With everyone self-isolating to flatten the curve on COVID-19, pick-up and delivery services are experiencing a boon. By integrating KDS into your POS system, you have the ability to connect the kitchen with the rest of the restaurant from any device: handheld, self-service kiosks and the POS terminal. You can also take that a step further and connect the kitchen with your online ordering system.
With so many restaurants forced to shut down dine-in services and little to no front of house staff on duty, giving an immediate and organized channel for customers to send their orders directly to cooks eliminates a lot of time and confusion. With so few employees available and delivery already precariously reliant on a dish’s ability to travel well, mistakes could take a lot of time to correct, if you can correct them at all. By sending orders directly to KDS, you’ll improve customer satisfaction and in times like these, every delivery counts. Building a loyal customer base that repeatedly orders from your restaurant is more crucial than ever and can stay with you long after this pandemic is over.
Ultimately, KDS streamlines kitchen efficiency and hastens table turn time so you can serve more customers faster, as well as significantly improving delivery speed and accuracy. Although times are tough right now for restaurants, a little investment can go a long way if you let it and will continue to benefit you long after this is all over.
To find out more about how KDS can help your business, schedule a demo with eatOS today.
