As your business grows, checking people out quickly becomes increasingly important to ensure your customer service is at the highest standard possible. No one likes waiting in a queue — whether they’re doing it at your store or on a phone, it puts people’s impatience levels into overdrive.
Here are some effective ways you can make sure that you’re checking people out as quickly as possible, keeping that queue moving, your customers smiling, and those sales flowing.
Get an more intelligent point-of-sale system
The first step is the easiest: set your business up with a POS system that’s fast and easy for you (and your staff) to use. Being able to quickly enter and ring up even the most complicated customer orders in a system (we’re looking at you, half-strength, soy flat whites with a third of sugar) will increase speed. With the Square Point of Sale app, you can quickly set up items on your smartphone or tablet, along with pictures so that you can quickly find each item at a glance. It’s also just as simple to add on modifiers (like vanilla syrup or an upsize, for example).
Accept contactless cards and mobile wallets
Paying by cash is slow. There’s a lot of potential for a lot of wallet fumbling to find the right change by your customer, and all that on-the-fly math to figure out the exact change on your end.
Contactless payments — whether from cards or mobile wallets like Apple Pay and Android Pay — move the queue a whole lot faster. The Square Reader for contactless and chip let you accept contactless payments in seconds. Order yours today.
Switch to digital receipts
When you’re struggling with a queue out the door, every second spend on a transaction counts. Printing paper receipts for every customer is not only slow, but it’s also damaging to the environment. Switch to a POS that has the ability to email or SMS your customer a digital receipt, and you’ll be saving time as well as making a contribution back to the local environment.
Train your staff
Staff that are trained effectively, are quick thinkers and fast on their feet are the best to put behind the counter. Make sure they know exactly how to find and add items, accept and process every type of payment, send digital receipts, and issue refunds. You might even give them a friendly pop quiz by throwing a complicated order at them and seeing how quickly they can get you checked out.
Limit your assortment
When it comes to the items you sell, sometimes a smaller range can make a big difference. This is especially true if you’re a quick-service restaurant or specialty coffee bar, as oftentimes people make purchasing decisions when they get up to the counter. Make the checkout experience as simple as possible for your customers by not overwhelming them with options. Experiment with what works for your business, but a general rule of thumb is that it’s always better to have fewer quality items than a bunch of mediocre ones.
