Providing guests with high quality food and great service are crucial objectives for full-service restaurants; however, they are only part of the experience. In an age of connected consumers and Yelp reviews, restaurants can’t afford to leave guests with a bad experience. Yet many restaurants still fail to address the final stage of the dining experience: the payment process. The traditional system in which servers run back and forth from the table can drain a restaurant’s profitability and negatively impact the guest experience.
As a result, innovative restaurants are moving toward pay-at-the-table solutions that put transactions in the hands of customers. However, many solutions actually add inefficiency and are often cumbersome to use.
TableSafe built the RAIL payment platform to optimize the “final mile” of hospitality. The RAIL is designed to be left by the server at the table to let guest process their own payments, including splitting checks. Enabling the server to focus on the guest increases ticket averages and turns tables faster. Evidence shows that TableSafe provides up to a 5 percent increase in revenue. In addition, the TableSafe RAIL platform reduces cost with efficiencies in receipt reconciliation, faster shift closing for servers, and up to a two-thirds reduction in thermal paper usage. Servers are motivated because the RAIL also increases tips by as much as 26 percent.
“Often the waiter has to make as many as eight trips from the guest table to the point of sale terminal. How can you give a guest a wonderful dining experience and then essentially ruin it during the payment process?” says Gordon Gardiner, CEO of TableSafe. “Servers can spend as much as one-third of their shift processing payment. TableSafe, enables the server to focus on what they do best—providing the ultimate dining experience.”
TableSafe’s RAIL platform eliminates the security risks that come with traditional payments including the theft of consumer payment information or duplicating the credit card. TableSafe processes the payment using point-to-point encryption, eliminating any consumer credit card information on the restaurant database and thereby protecting the restaurant from data breach. Additionally the RAIL accepts EMV-based transactions reducing the risk of restaurant chargebacks.
TableSafe also integrates a quick polling survey at the end of the payment process which maintains an 85 percent response rate assessing the guest’s dining experience. This instant feedback is a powerful tool for the management team to address any issues that may cause the guest to leave the restaurant feeling dissatisfied.
Slow payment process, poor Yelp reviews, inattentive service, data breaches, and fraud all act as virtual bandits that impact the customer experience and drain restaurant profits. Now there is an industry proven weapon to combat these “bandits,” and it’s called the RAIL by TableSafe.
