While faster table turnover means greater profitability, how can you speed things up without making your customers feel rushed? The answer is in smart technology. 

Here’s how restaurants use Liven’s Point of Sale andKitchen Display Solutions to increase efficiency, reduce wait times, and enhance the dining experience at every step in the customer journey.

1. Seat & Serve Customers Faster with Table Maps

Step one to speeding up your service starts when the customer enters the restaurant. Meet your secret weapon for getting your customers seated and ready to order in record time: table maps. With the table map feature in Liven Abacus POS, your staff can get a real-time, colour-coded view of which tables are available, occupied, or need service. This means quicker seating, faster order-taking, and fewer delays.

Pro Tip: If your walk-in customers don’t usually wait for assistance to be seated, it may be a good idea to get set up with Table Ordering using Liven OrderUp. This will make it easier for these customers to also place their order without waiting for staff.

2.  Take your POS & Ordering to the Table

Mobile POS terminals like Liven’s Abacus GO and online ordering platforms like Liven’s Orderup enable tableside ordering anywhere. This is especially critical during seasonal peaks when outdoor seating and expanded seating tax the ability of waiters to get to an increased number of tables more distant from the usual group. Enabling customers to order from the table not only accelerates table turnovers and reduces staffing costs, it results in 20% higher (or more) order values.

3. Speed Up the Kitchen with KDS and Prep Time Reports

Once you’re sure that the front of the house is running smoothly, the next step is to look at the back of the house. The kitchen often becomes a bottleneck when service is busy due to miscommunication, misplaced orders, and slow preparation times. A Kitchen Display System (KDS) connected to your POS, like Liven’s Abacus KDS, eliminates these issues by sending orders in real-time from the POS to kitchen screens.

But there’s more—Liven’s Abacus KDS also tracks speed of service and prep time. These reports show how long each dish takes to prepare, helping you identify bottlenecks, optimize workflows, and allocate staff effectively. You can also customise your KDS screens based on your kitchen stations & workflows, to show summaries, or course-wise, ingredient-wise and product-wise breakdowns.

Pro Tip: Use the automatic smart order routing function on Liven Abacus KDS to evenly distribute tasks across your kitchen. And, use a Captains KDS to review order completeness and avoid multiple trips to the table.

4. Make Payments a Breeze

Okay, now you know that customers will be seated and served efficiently. When they finish their meal and are ready to pay is where step 4 kicks in. Slow or cumbersome checkout processes can frustrate diners and delay table turnover. That’s where Liven’s payment solutions shine. Liven Payments allows you to accept all types of payments including Cash, Google Pay, Apple Pay, WeChat, Alipay, Wallets, rewards, and credit cards. Liven’s Abacus POS also helps you:

• Make it more streamlined for customers to request a bill: No more gesturing to capture the attention of the staff! The Table Ordering feature on Abacus POS has features to allow your customers to request a bill or request assistance with the press of a button. This notifies your staff through Table Maps and they can get to the table quickly.

• Set up self-pay options for customers: Allow customers to settle their bill themselves through a printed or online QR code which, when scanned, retrieves their order for review, and enables easy payments. 

• Expedite group payments: Use the Tabs feature to open & close tabs with easy and set limits. The Bill Splitting feature lets you quickly split the bill by item or into equal & custom portions (without having to do the calculations yourself) and allows customers to settle using different payment methods.

Your servers can also use Abacus GO to take payments right at the table & speed up the checkout process.

Pro Tip: Don’t miss out on loyalty while trying to speed up payments. Automatically issue rewards to card-linked payments through Liven Loyalty & Rewards. Liven Loyalty is also fully integrated with the Liven Abacus POS system so your customers can redeem your own custom venue-branded payments or rewards easily or ‘Pay with Liven’.

5. Encourage Online Bookings

While encouraging customers to book their tables in advance can be a great revenue-driver, online reservation systems can be expensive to run and complex to manage. If you are after simple and easy reservations, look at a POS system with native reservation capabilities like Abacus POS. Liven Abacus POS’ reservations add-on allows guests to plan their visit, helping you optimize seating and manage customer flow.

Pro Tip: Promote your reservations module on your Magic App, website, social media, and Google My Business profile. You can also use the Abacus POS Pocket Manager Mobile App to manage online bookings remotely.

Liven’s customers have seen increased table turnover, reduced wait times, and increased revenue with the help of these technologies. 

Bonus Tip: Rather than purchasing these technologies as ingredients and trying to make them work together, these hospo operators bought a complete wholesome dish prepared by Liven. These tools work together as one integrated system, giving them even better results at lower costs. And that is their secret sauce.

Ready to (Liven) up your venue’s revenue? Contact us today!