Tips & Insights from Arryved
Although guests might not always realize it, a taproom, brewpub, or tasting room’s point of sale can be a make-or-break element of their experience. When you envision the ideal experience for your guests, a brewery point of sale may not be at the top of your list either, but choosing a system that serves both your guests and your business can have a huge impact.
Craft Your Vision
What is your vision for the perfect guest experience? What will they see when they enter your space? What will their interactions with your staff be like? Do you want to be their home away from home or to make them feel like they’re on an adventure to a place they’ve never been? No matter what your vision is, your point of service should enable you to make it a reality.
Enable a Cohesive Experience
The ideal guest experience should be seamless: guests can keep the same tab open as they move through the space; their bartender doesn’t have to hold onto their card; they can order anywhere, anytime. This creates a lasting impression. But imagine the experience from the business side too: the ability to make service adjustments based on the needs of the day, simplicity in merging or splitting tabs, utilizing robust data to inform growth decisions, and even more. A great brewery point of sale enables an exemplary service experience from both the business and the guest sides, integrating that great experience into your brand.
Flexibility is Key
It’s critical to have a brewery point of sale that flexes and grows with your business. Traditional POS systems weren’t built to flex; the stationary terminal design serves a stationary service model. However, in craft beverage businesses, a Tuesday lunch, weekend happy hour, or event like a charity run prove vastly different experiences (and requirements on your POS!). Not having the right tools to support these different scenarios leaves guests experiencing long lines and slow service.
For instance, if a guest’s move from the bar to a table requires them to close out their bar tab and then reopen a tab with the server at their table, or if a bartender has to hold onto cards until it’s close-out time, the work environment feels cumbersome and creates a sluggish experience for the customer. Seek out a brewery point of sale that allows managers to expand service as needed and doesn’t require hardwiring, so the system can move with you and grow with your business.
Robust data offerings allow you to make the most of a flexible system. Use reporting to make informed decisions about growth and utilize the human resources potential of employee performance data. Data reported by your POS should help you make more efficient staffing decisions, whether you’re prepping for a usual week or your annual IPA festival!
The Operations Connection
Taprooms and tasting rooms serve as showrooms for the production and distribution sides of your business. A comprehensive brewery point of sale system gives decision-makers access to data on the fly, allowing them to test new recipes and get immediate reactions to beverage sales: how quickly, at what price, at what time of day, the impacts of seasonality, and more. For example, is your new specialty beverage selling more tasters than pints? If guests are trying it out and not ordering a full pour, that could be a good signal that your market doesn’t have a taste for that particular beverage. Useful data like this drives production, marketing, and distribution.
By supporting a seamless service experience, your POS can also give staff the opportunity to connect and educate your guests in meaningful ways. Imagine a customer is chatting with a server, hearing the origin story of the business and its unique approach. The server quickly enters the guest’s order into the POS; as the conversation continues uninterrupted, a runner delivers the drinks. Now that the guest has libations in hand, the server leaves them to enjoy with a deepened appreciation for the drinks and the people who made them. Your POS has freed your staff to do what they do best: sell your product and bond with your community.
A huge factor in an innovative brewery point of sale is its ability to bust lines—lines of guests waiting to order or close-out at the bar, and lines of servers waiting to access a stationary terminal. The inefficiencies of long lines cause increased labor costs and a poor guest experience. A nimble, tablet-based POS system means any staffer can pull guests out of line, take their order, and run their credit card on the spot. The result? Healthier profit margins and a much more pleasant guest experience.
If you find you are spending a lot of time moving revenue and inventory data from one place to another, adding an integrated inventory management system to your toolbelt could be a huge win! When you ensure your POS can integrate to your inventory management software, as Arryved does with Ekos, the comprehensive data gives you a keen eye into your operations and your costs from raw ingredients all the way to guests enjoying the finished product.
Look to the Future
A brewery point of sale that looks out for both your business and your customer should be future-oriented. The software provider should have a sense of where the industry is moving and an eye on the next big innovation. Paying on an app, like with Uber or Lyft, is the next frontier for the industry. It gives the guest the ability to control their experience and, as has become vital during the pandemic, offers a contactless payment solution.
A fully integrated online ordering platform allows merchants to add an additional sales channel, with little effort. Especially as stay-at-home, capacity limitations, and other rules around the pandemic shift, having an online store that integrates with the POS is critical. Staff no longer need to field calls and take credit cards over the phone; all your inventory syncs from the same place, eliminating the need to make menu changes through multiple channels; all online orders print to a centralized printer, so staff doesn’t have to monitor orders coming from different places. And of course, the customer controls the transaction with easy ordering.
A loyalty program built-in to your POS is a gamechanger. A traditional program is rewards-based, which doesn’t take much effort to manage, but also doesn’t provide much data. A customizable program, fully integrated with the point of sale, provides critical insights to build engagement catered to your brand while personalizing how guests are rewarded—and keeping them coming back for more!
Many businesses begin with a vision. Don’t let the vision—of the ideal business or of the perfect guest experience—be compromised. Find a brewery point of sale partner that will help you grow your business and flex to meet the needs of the day – the partner that will help you bring your vision to life.
Who is Arryved?
Founded in 2016, Boulder, CO based Arryved is a point-of-service based software company specializing in the craft beverage service industry: breweries, cideries, distilleries, wineries, brewpubs, and non-production taprooms. In four short years they’ve grown from being an idea on a taproom coaster, to a revered platform serving hundreds of satisfied accounts. They’re a team of tech geeks with relentless passion for, and extensive experience in, the craft beverage industry as both employees and consumers. Their goal is simple: deliver a flexible, reliable, team-centric platform that puts service first in every way. Evolve the archaic Point of Sale system from being a much-maligned obstacle into a flexible Point of Service tool that elevates guest experiences, fosters enhanced server relationships, and provides owners and managers with robust and easily digestible insight to make informed decisions. For more information visit www.arryved.com.
Thanks to our friends at Arryved for providing this guest post.
