Contactless Drive-Thru With a Simple Upgrade to Your POS System

Offering the convenience of a drive-thru is a great way to give customers access to your products with a high degree of safety. However, a contactless drive-thru experience must be carefully crafted in order to become a hit with customers. Accuracy, quality, and safety will be pivotal considerations when designing your own contactless drive-thru experience. But these can all be easily addressed by adding a handful of features to your POS technology platform.

Step 1: Take Your POS System Mobile

The ability to provide a contactless experience in any form is dictated by your ability to minimize physical interactions in as many places as possible. Mobile POS technology is the perfect choice for implementing a contactless experience in any area of your business. Although traditional businesses may find themselves making drastic operational changes, those with existing drive-thru models will have a simpler time developing a contactless drive-thru model.

Mobile POS technology helps businesses answer all of the important questions surrounding a true contactless drive-thru experience. The mobile options offer several options around ordering, payment, and pickup coordination making the experience simple and easy to manage. And many of these same mobile features can be applied to how you operate outside of your drive-thru, helping you to maximize your ROI even faster.

Step 2: Add an Online Ordering Presence to Support Your Drive-Thru

An online ordering platform is an instrumental piece of the contactless puzzle. It allows customers to place orders before they begin their journey to your business while accepting payment for the order immediately thereafter. This immediately eliminates several steps from your typical drive-thru process and presents you with options for providing faster service without adding staff or cutting corners. However, an online ordering platform must include a few features to make it fully functional.

The most effective online ordering platform for any contactless business model is to use one that is provided by your POS provider. Doing so means that orders placed online will seamlessly flow through your POS system making the fulfillment of orders much faster and more accurate. Also, the data you collect from these additional channels will provide you with the insights you need to make precision changes to your business in response to changing customer tastes.

Step 3: Mobile Payment Acceptance is a Must

With online ordering comes the ability to accept payments from any ordering source or payment type. Since cash is an unlikely payment choice for customers looking for contactless experiences, you can shift your focus to the use of mobile payment platforms such as apps or web-based invoicing. Accepting payment on your ordering website or sending the customer a digital invoice with a link for payment will help everyone keep their distance while enjoying the interaction.

Accepting payment in person does not mean that you are sacrificing elements of a contactless experience. Using a contactless card reader at your drive-thru window will still help keep a safe distance between your employee and the customer. Additional contactless payment strategies can include a mounted QR code that, when scanned, takes a customer to your online ordering website and allows them to pay while remaining in their vehicle.

Step 4: Getting the Product to the Customer’s (Car) Door

The term “drive-thru” can mean different things in our current world. Coordinating the pickup or exchange of items is perhaps the most precarious of all of the performed contactless tasks. Also, curbside pickup, or click and collect, can be considered a drive-thru option, which further muddies the waters. So how can you safely get your products to the customer without sacrificing the intentions of a contactless drive-thru experience?

Coordinating pickup times is an ideal way to accomplish this. A trending option is the offering of order pickup cubes or shelves. Once an order has been placed, the customer receives a number or a code on their digital receipt that corresponds to a shelf location. They arrive, pick up their items from the location, and depart. This drive-thru variant nearly eliminates contact of any kind and is easy to establish and monitor using POS technology.

Step 5: Reach Out to the Contactless Drive-Thru Experts

There are several moving pieces involved in putting together a contactless drive-thru strategy. Employees must know exactly what to do and execute these tasks with precision and safety at the forefront of their minds. Also, customers will have varying degrees of fear, ranging from near panic to being completely nonchalant. It is up to you to leverage the full potential of your POS solution to make accommodations for any drive-thru situation that can be imagined.

Engaging the services of a POS consultant with proven small business experience will help you to implement the best possible contactless solution. Using the wisdom of past experiences, they will craft a technology solution so that your employees and customers can feel safe throughout any interaction. This way, you can continue to operate at your fullest potential while providing high-quality products and services to your loyal customer base.

In a period of change, talech has a number of POS solutions that can help your business adjust operations smoothly. From reaching new audiences to engaging with your existing customers more often, we give you the tools to adapt quickly and with confidence.