What is a tablet farm?
To expand their audience and meet customer expectations many restaurants are using multiple third-party delivery apps like Grubhub, Uber Eats, and DoorDash. But many of these don’t connect with a restaurant’s POS system. To make up for this, the restaurant receives orders through a tablet provided by the respective delivery service.
Even a single tablet can cause mayhem in a restaurant, and most restaurants use several, as a separate one is required for each service. A Tablet farm is a nickname for the location where the restaurant keeps their 3rd party delivery tablets. There are often so many of them and they are such a constant struggle to keep up with, that they earned this nickname.
Why do restaurants struggle with delivery app tablets?
There are many reasons even a single tablet can cause operational issues at a restaurant.
- Order Errors – Orders that appear on the tablet must be manually transferred into the restaurant’s POS system. On average, 15% of manually-entered orders contain at least one error, leading to incorrect or incomplete orders and disappointed customers.
- Missed Orders –Staff gets busy and tablets require constant monitoring. What is the result? Orders come in, but go unnoticed
- d. The delivery driver arrives and the order has not been made, leading to complaints from both the driver and the customer due to the unnecessary delay.
- Learning Curve – While not necessarily difficult to use, each tablet operates a little differently depending on which third-party delivery service it is synced to. When hiring and training staff is already a major challenge thanks to the fallout of the pandemic, operators are pressed even further to find time to train staff on multiple interfaces.
- Operational Challenges – Updating multiple systems routinely becomes a struggle when hours, availability, menu items, prices, and more are constantly changing. While many restaurants manage these items using their POS system, with online ordering staff have to log in to each food delivery service provider’s portal to make updates (again, each with their own interface to learn). This leads to mistakes, inconsistencies, and out-of-date menus which affect the customer experience.
How can restaurants solve these challenges and eliminate delivery tablets altogether?
Thankfully there are companies that provide a single, cost-effective solution to all of these problems. ItsaCheckmate is a low-cost, easy-to-use tool that directly connects a restaurant’s existing POS system with all of its ordering platforms.
What does this mean for the restaurant? No more need for tablets, since orders from third-party platforms, appear in the POS automatically; no more errors from manual entry. No extra platforms to train staff on or for staff to monitor. Changes made in the POS simply and automatically appear in the ordering platform menus. So the next time the restaurant runs out of an item, staff need only note it once in the POS. ItsaCheckmate ensures that the menus hosted by third-party delivery partners are updated almost instantly.
Too good to be true?
Sometimes simple solutions aren’t always so simple. With Checkmate, that is not the case. Our solution makes online delivery so easy for restaurants that on average, new customers process 26% more online orders within their first months and 39% within the first year.
Could your restaurant benefit from increased revenue through additional online orders? Try our solution for yourself with a free, no-risk, 14-day trial today.
