The exponential growth of digital ordering — allowing customers to order and pay ahead from their own devices — continues to take the restaurant industry by storm, with analysts predicting that digital ordering will be the prime ordering channel industry-wide within the next five years. In a time when many restaurant brands are setting digital ordering as a top agenda item, it’s critical that restaurant technologists fully grasp the fundamental differences between a cloud POS and a fully-featured digital ordering engine.
As Internet access has become widespread, faster and more reliable, many POS providers have moved their transaction processing to the cloud. First, upstart, tablet-based POS players did so, and now even some of the oldest POS platforms in the industry are following suit.
However, moving the POS to the cloud is not the same as enabling digital ordering from customers. As it relates to digital ordering, the relatively new wave of cloud POS means that the POS provider can enable a cloud endpoint to which a digital ordering engine can interface, rather than an in-store endpoint.
Aside from shifting the point where the two systems interact, that accomplishes little else. It’s fundamentally a question of whose cloud you use to ship orders from the cloud to the brick-and-mortar store, and then to synchronize the brick-and-mortar menu to the cloud menu.
Whether you chose to use the digital ordering engine as the cloud provider and interface with an in-store endpoint of the POS, or use the POS as the cloud provider and interface to a cloud endpoint, there’s much more to consider in enabling digital ordering. To (over)simplify, digital ordering considerations break down into these three major buckets:
• User experience
• Store operations
• System administration
A great end-to-end digital ordering experience is about more than just order entry and transmission. It’s also about enabling a smooth hand-off to the customer at the counter or curbside.
User Experience
User experience is essential to digital ordering success. A restaurant CEO once joked to me "I would never want to inflict my point of sale upon my customers." Indeed.
The way that your menu is presented to customers, as well as which categories, products, modifiers, nested modifiers, and combos are available, and how this may vary by daypart, are not typically hard-coded into the POS version of the menu. Rather, restaurants go to great lengths to train their staff to know how to use the POS.
When it comes to digital ordering, the customer needs to be able to intuitively build his or her favorite order without chancing the creation of a "Frankenstein-type" food product, like a bacon cheeseburger with mint chip ice cream on top, which restaurant staff know not to create.
The menu must be intuitive and rules-based across various user interfaces, from desktop website to mobile site and mobile app. That menu must also include consumer-facing content like high resolution images, product and nutritional descriptions, as well as information about ingredients. In other words, the kind of content that does not often appear in the POS version of the menu.
A great end-to-end digital ordering experience is about more than just order entry and transmission. It’s also about enabling a smooth hand-off to the customer at the counter or curbside. None of this functionality exists in your typical POS, cloud or otherwise.
Stores can control digital order flow, as well as being able to push overflow digital orders to shoulder times, and prevent overload in the kitchen, while meeting customer expectations, by throttling a maximum amount of order production capacity to any given time increment.
Store Operations
To manage the complexities of the flow of digital orders and integrate them into store operations requires that you know each dish's prep time throughout the day. For example, from noon to 2 p.m., a bacon cheeseburger prepares in 7 minutes after hitting the kitchen ticket printer. This prep time calculation allows order scheduling for specific times without operational disruption in-store.
Stores can control digital order flow, as well as being able to push overflow digital orders to shoulder times, and prevent overload in the kitchen, while meeting customer expectations, by throttling a maximum amount of order production capacity to any given time increment.
The digital ordering engine can also process transactions above store, directly into credit card merchant accounts or stored-value provider to avoid making customers retrieve and pay for digital orders at the counter. That alleviates a major source of operational slowdown and inconvenience to the customer. But again, these features aren’t in the typical POS, but are specific to the digital ordering and store operation experience.
System Administration
Digital ordering requires an un-POS-like level of system administration. Customers can create accounts and tie often-sensitive details to them, like menu and store favorites, credit and stored value card information, order history and delivery addresses, much of which must be stored in payment card industry- or personally identifiable information-compliant ways. Traditional POS systems cannot do this because they are not built on the concept of customers as recurring users. Rather, POS systems treat customers as one-time guests.
Each restaurant must also be able to configure its digital ordering store details (hours, holiday overrides, etc.) and grant permission to specific staff to access administrative functions of the digital ordering system. Other functions, like digital ordering sales reporting and customer location tracking are also unavailable via the typical POS.
So, while digital ordering and cloud POS are emerging contemporaneously, restaurant brands must remember that enabling a POS to be configured remotely through cloud POS is quite different from giving customers the ability to digitally order and pay from their own devices. Though these two technologies can go hand-in-hand, a fully featured digital ordering engine is the best solution for a great digital ordering experience.
