Modern Restaurant Management: Tackling the Labor Shortage with Virtual Customer Queuing
Article Publish Date: April 18, 2022
Article Abstract:
As restaurants continue to deal with the staffing shortages affecting the entire industry, they inevitably look for ways to improve the employee experience. Measures such as better pay, attractive benefits, and flexible scheduling may attract more workers, but they aren’t quite solving the overall labor challenge.
Restaurants that can’t find the workers they need must figure out how to make the most of the staff they already have. That’s also not so easy; there’s only so much efficiency you can squeeze out of your operations.
Surprisingly, enhancing the customer experience can go a long way toward alleviating staffing challenges. Virtual queuing offers an opportunity to impress and delight customers while improving the employee experience and increasing your restaurant’s efficiency.
When a restaurant is crowded and more customers arrive than there are tables and/or staff to accommodate them, people will be forced to wait their turn for service. Likely, they’ll give their names to a host and wait to be called. That’s not necessarily a bad thing—when you have enough staff to handle the crowd and an efficient plan to get those waiting customers seated and served in a reasonable amount of time, you can call it a successful day.