Partner Content by Clover Connect

Think back on your last restaurant experience – whether it was a convenient stop at a quick-serve restaurant, a familiar meal at your favorite neighborhood spot, or a seat at the chef’s table for a multi-course tasting menu. What happened when it came time to pay the bill? What method of payment did you use? Did a slow checkout damper your dining experience? These are the unsuspecting questions you may not be considering when reflecting on customer satisfaction.

We’ve seen it happen before – a great meal tarnished by an inconvenient or lengthy process to pay the dinner bill. Don’t let that happen to your restaurant. A seamless checkout is more important to customers than you may think. When the last bite of dessert leaves the plate, the right digital payment solution can often be the cherry on top.

We’re sharing the recipe for success – how digital payment solutions offer significant benefits for your restaurant business and customers. Your restaurant needs a digital payments solution, and here’s why.

A digital payments evolution

The rate of technological change is faster than ever. And so, your ability to keep pace with an accelerated world relies on your ability to embrace new technologies and adapt to evolving customer habits and expectations. Traditionally popular payment methods such as cash and credit cards are now rivaled by mobile and digital payment options. To use one example, 32% of Americans in a Statista survey said they would like to pay with a smartphone all the time.

The question every restaurant owner should be asking themselves: Are my current payment solutions keeping up with digital transformation? You should make the most of modern technology and smarter solutions when it comes to your payments – the same way you innovate in the kitchen or reinvent your menu.

If implemented successfully, an effective digital payment solution can have quite a few benefits. These benefits extend beyond payments ease, helping to increase customer satisfaction, improve business efficiently, and provide other conveniences like real-time reporting, seamless integrations, and reduced PCI compliance burden.

When exploring your options, it’s best to set out to find a provider that will not only offer digital payment solutions and secure payment acceptance integrations, but support and resources to help businesses keep growing.

Checkout convenience

While some restaurants still prefer to deal only in cash transactions and others push to go completely cashless, the reality is that customers now want a variety of payment methods depending on the setting. The options you offer will depend on the type of restaurant you are running, and how willing you are to move along with customer trends. Regardless of the circumstances of your establishment, your options should be fast, flexible, and convenient.

Digital payment solutions can increase transaction speeds and make contactless or self-service payments possible. This is particularly important in the restaurant industry, where time is of the essence and short wait times are critical.

When it’s time to drop the check, make sure you don’t drop the ball. Here are some digital payment solutions and restaurant checkout methods worth considering.

Integrated, single-source solutions

Integrations that combine software with secure payment acceptance solutions allow you to seamlessly accept payments and manage your business, all in one place. No more jumping between systems or complicated reconciliation efforts.

Online payments

The benefits of accepting and managing payments online can help you improve the guest experience and cash flow – especially with card-not-present interactions or special event orders. There are countless online payments solutions that can be implemented in a variety of different ways. Whichever solution you choose, the good news is that they all reduce friction at checkout and let customers self-service and pay (this means no more payments over the phone hassles!). Your customers may manage payments directly on a guest portal or access a secure link to pay via hosted payment pages and ecommerce sites.

Payments from a customer’s mobile device

There are great alternatives to incorporate pay-at-the-table convenience and touch-free options for customers to pay for a meal, without necessarily requiring a tableside kiosk or POS device.

Scan to pay: QR codes offer an easy and low-cost alternative. In light of COVID-19, restaurants have already started to adapt table-specific QR codes for menu and ordering functionality. Now, QR codes are used in payment processing too. Guests can scan their unique QR code and pay a bill directly from their mobile phone in real-time.

Text to pay: This option leverages technologies that enable restaurants to request and receive payments from customers via text – providing an easy, convenient, and contactless payment experience that can simultaneously increase efficiency on catering or to-go orders. Customers simply receive a payment request via text and authorize payment in real-time, within the same text thread.

Powerful point of sale devices

A modern countertop POS may work great for quick service and fast casual restaurants where customers approach a counter to pay for their meals. A handheld POS provides faster table service and efficient check-out processes by eliminating the time servers spend running back and forth between tables and the restaurant POS system.

Another tip? See if your POS device is contactless-enabled. This includes tap-to-pay options using a card or contactless payments using a mobile wallet (such as Apple Pay®).

Tripleseat’s partner, Clover Connect, can help you stay ahead of digital payments and keep customers happy

In summary, customer satisfaction is the secret ingredient to success in the hospitality industry. If you want consumers to spend (and enjoy) their time at your restaurant, you must value their time. Understanding the delays or weaknesses in your checkout process is the first step to improving it. Whether your driving force is convenience, security, or sustainability, digital payment solutions are becoming a requirement. In the long run, modernizing your customer payment experience will have numerous benefits for your restaurant.

Get more choice in payment acceptance with Clover Connect. Tripleseat partnered with Clover Connect to offer secure and faster payments. Integrated directly with Tripleseat software, Clover Connect solutions span physical POS, online, and mobile interfaces, offering real-time reporting and security features like tokenization and point-to-point encryption.

Are you a current Tripleseat customer interested in exploring Clover Connect solutions? Let’s get started!

Editor’s Note: This post is from Clover Connect, one of Tripleseat’s valued partners and a supporter of EventCamp.