Why POS wasn’t sticking at table service restaurants
BentoBox is a leading marketing and commerce platform for restaurants. Clover POS (point of sale) is an industry lead in payment processing. Together, the companies comprise the Restaurant Solutions team at Fiserv, helping restaurants succeed in their mission of hospitality.
Background & Goal
When it comes to payment processing, Clover POS was high performing in retail and service businesses. In the restaurant space, they were doing great at counter service restaurants, but struggled to break into table service restaurants.
On the other hand, BentoBox has served table service restaurants for the last decade and has been a technology leader, especially in the fine dining space.
The two companies set out to discover why Clover POS wasn’t sticking with table service restaurants. As a PM at BentoBox, working in partnership with Clover, my mission was to discover what jobs needed to be done by owners, managers and staff, and to identify where Clover’s technology was not serving the the restaurant or their guests.
Methods
I carried out my discovery work by using several ethnographic research methods, including the customer interview and on-site shadowing. I was paired with a Clover customer who had been using the payment processor for 3 years and was very dissatisfied with the product.
Interview 1: I first held a one-hour remote phone interview with the restaurant manager to help establish some contexts for the restaurant and their business needs.
Observation: I observed the staff on-site for two hours during their Dinner shift, observing the bartender, the servers working tables, and then the kitchen staff. This included documenting every interaction between staff & guest, or between staff and POS.
Interview 2: I ended my visit with a 30 minute interview with the restaurant Owner.
Key Learnings
During my visit and through my interview, several issues came up that make it very difficult for table service restaurants to use Clover.
Counter service restaurants have one interaction with guests — a guest orders items then pays. But Table Service Restaurants have numerous interactions with guests. Rather than ordering everything at once and paying, the guest orders food and dishes over the course of the evening. Food orders go to the kitchen, drink orders to the bar, and servers are responsible to make sure orders are fulfilled and brought to guests in a timely manner. We also found there were several interactions between guest + server in order to pay.
Effectively, Clover was trying to shoehorn table service customers to use a counter service product. I identified four pain points:
Items don’t sync across devices: The restaurant has both a handheld POS device and a stationary POS. There are more staff than devices so the team has to share, but the devices don’t sync. When items are added to a tab, it doesn’t sync across the other devices. They showed me how they have to hit a “sync now” button to make them show up.
Items disappear from tab: Servers find when they return to a device, items that were added no longer appear in the tab. They need to try and recall the order from memory. But also sometimes it shows up on a different table’s tab. It’s a nightmare.
Printers: Servers punch in orders at the POS, and those orders get printed in the kitchen or the bar. However, if the wi-fi connection cuts out, the printers stop working and the kitchen/bar doesn’t get orders. To turn printers back on, a manager’s code is required. But a manager isn’t always on-site, staff need to call and get code over the phone, and then the manager needs to change their code when they’re back in. Every employee I spoke to shared this problem. The Staff have their own codes to punch in orders, and wish those could enable the Printer.
Applying discounts to a single person: There is no way to add a discount to a single person. It applies the discount to everyone at the table. This is especially problematic when someone comes in with a Groupon.
Payments have multiple touch points & long waits: Guest flags server, and asks to pay. Server goes to POS, prints check, and brings to guest. The guest pulls out credit card and flags the server down again. The server runs the card and brings the receipt. The guest adds a tip. The whole process took 10 minutes in several cases.
My recommendation to the Clover product team would be to consider
how many interactions take place between staff, devices, and the guest. The guest journey is much longer and there’s greater entropy (like wifi or battery outages) and so the different terminals need to stay up to date.
I’d also suggest rethinking how the bill gets generated — by the table vs by guest(s).
Finally, there is an opportunity to radically rethink the problematic zig-zagging when a diner wants to pay.
