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From Chaos to Control: How PAR Brink POS Transforms the Daily Grind for Restaurant Staff

PAR Team — Wed, 17 Jan 2024 05:00:04 +0000

In today’s restaurant landscape, where new technology and flashy trends vie for attention, a fundamental truth remains: human connection is the bedrock of truly remarkable guest experiences. As Brett Schulman, CEO of Cava and a valued PAR customer, aptly said in a recent QSR article, “the people who deliver great service every day, in every restaurant, every shift” are what set winning concepts apart. Well-trained, motivated, and engaged employees are the architects of genuine hospitality, crafting seamless operations, top-notch service, and a welcoming atmosphere that inspires loyalty and repeat business.

However, the industry faces a harsh reality: high staff turnover. According to a National Restaurant Association survey, nearly 62% of restaurant operators lacked the personnel to meet customer needs in 2023. This revolving door of employees disrupts operations, leaving knowledge gaps and requiring constant re-training. The impact is significant: increased training costs, compromised service quality and consistency, and ultimately, a dampened bottom line.

In this tight labor landscape, prioritizing the staff experience is crucial. Restaurants need to invest in technology that empowers their employees. The POS system – pulsing with omnichannel orders, data, and the constant churn of a busy day – holds immense potential to transform the staff experience. Streamlining operations, automating tasks, and minimizing errors frees staff from stress, allows faster service, and equips them for success. By creating a smoother experience with the right POS, you’ll see the rewards in efficient operations, happier staff, and delighted guests. For this, choose a complete POS partner – powerful tools, scalable tech, purposeful customer-focused innovation, and trusted allyship.

PAR Brink POS: Designed for Staff Success

PAR Brink POS, a leading cloud-based POS system, addresses staff-centric needs head-on. Built with meaningful innovation that prioritizes user needs and experience, Brink empowers your team from day one. Its flexible design and powerful functionality ease morning rushes, dinner crowds, and everything in between, reducing friction and making work less stressful.

Let’s explore some of Brink’s fantastic capabilities specifically designed to address common employee pain points ultimately making their jobs easier, more efficient, and more rewarding.

Resilient In-Store: In the hectic restaurant setting, a few things stress staff like a malfunctioning POS. Brink POS is designed to ensure that employees never lose access to their POS in-store, even in high-demand situations or technical disruptions. Even if the primary register stumbles, a dedicated backup seamlessly steps in, running independent of the internet and the cloud. This ensures that staff can focus on what they do best – delivering exceptional service – without the stress of tech meltdowns.
Configured To Staff Comfort: Take the guesswork out of the POS setup with flexible configurations and easy-to-customize screens. Brink bends to your restaurant, not the other way around. From out-of-the-box templates to custom menus and workflows, Brink fits your desired brand and processes. Staff learn in 30 minutes, not days, thanks to the intuitive interface and familiar feel. Less clicking, less training, and less stress ensures happy staff – it’s a Brink thing.
Easy Order Management: Sleek order preview panels let staff see up to 8 orders at once on the menu screen, allowing them to scan, validate, and process orders in seconds. No switching screens, hunting for details, or order confusion. Plus, Brink’s tablet-optimized drag & drop lets you shuffle orders on the fly. Easily manage the flow by moving orders, saving spots, and keeping everything organized with a single swipe. Brink ensures your team always stays in control.
Stress-free Pick-Ups: The Bag Chit feature consolidates all crucial order details onto one receipt, providing staff with a clear and concise overview of each guest’s to-go order. This eliminates the risk of order mix-ups and establishes a smooth pick-up process for both employees and guests, ultimately reducing stress and frustration for all.
Charitable Giving Made Easy: Brink’s Round Up for Charity functionality lets guests seamlessly support their favorite charities with a single tap at checkout, without the need for cashier prompting. It transforms potentially awkward moments between the guest and cashier into pressure-free, positive interactions. With manual prompting out the door, checkouts flow faster, making everyone happy.
No More Payday Panic: Brink POS automates pay rate changes, ensuring accuracy, efficiency, and workplace equity. No more manual scheduling or calculations. Operators gain insights into future labor costs and can synchronize adjustments for all employees fairly. Freed from administrative tasks, managers can focus on strategic initiatives and better support their staff.

Investing in a staff-friendly POS system like PAR Brink POS is more than just a purchase; it’s a strategic move. Empowering your team with the right tools and support leads to a ripple effect: happier employees, smoother operations, and ultimately, better bottom line. It’s a win-win that keeps your business thriving for years to come.

Visit us at Brink POS or request a demo today!

The post From Chaos to Control: How PAR Brink POS Transforms the Daily Grind for Restaurant Staff appeared first on partech.com.

Fortify Your Restaurant’s Payment Security with PAR Pay

PAR Team — Wed, 10 Jan 2024 19:22:00 +0000

In today’s dynamic market, every consumer possesses unique shopping preferences and behaviors. From what they order to how they order it, nearly every step in the customer journey is unique to the individual consumer. Yet, one aspect of the customer experience every consumer shares is paying for items. Whether it is with cash, a credit or debit card, or even a mobile phone, making payments will always be a step in the customer journey.

In recent years, digital and contactless payments, like credit and debit cards as well as mobile wallets, have quickly taken the main stage. Consumers today prioritize these methods of payment over traditional ones, like cash, because they are more convenient, and, frankly, more hygienic. In fact, a recent survey conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco found that over 90% of American consumers primarily pay for their purchases using any form (physical or virtual) of credit or debit card, while 9% of consumers still use cash or check.

However, a rise in digital and contactless payment users has ultimately led to a rise in cyber security threats and hackers attempting to get their pesky hands on valuable customer payment information. According to recent studies, around 65% of all American credit and debit card holders (roughly 151 million Americans) have fallen victim to fraudulent activity. These attacks will not only negatively affect customer satisfaction but also your brand’s reputation.

To combat these payment woes, it is paramount for brands to leverage tried-and-true technology like payment gateways and payment services. PAR Pay, which includes a payment gateway and payment services, handles payment security with the utmost importance. These enterprise-grade solutions stay up to date on required security certificates and standards to ensure brands properly protect their customers’ payment information, which helps you create better guest satisfaction and scale in the marketplace. PAR Pay devices use P2PE at the point of swipe or tap and are PCI compliant as well as PCI-SSF certified. Let’s take a more in-depth look at the various types of security measures PAR Pay provides and what it means for your brand:

Point-to-Point Encryption (P2PE) – This security standard encrypts a customer’s credit or debit card information when a purchase is initiated. The payment information is not decrypted until it reaches the payment processor, which will then approve or decline the transaction. Fully encrypted payment information ensures customer payment data cannot be easily stolen by hackers during a transaction.

PCI Compliance – Payment Card Industry compliance (PCI) is a set of technical and operational standards payment vendors must abide by to fully protect customer payment data. These set of standards are mandated by credit card companies to ensure consumer payment information is always safe and secure. Merchants who do not follow PCI standards are at risk of customers’ card information being hacked and misused.

PCI-SSF – The PCI Software Security Framework (SSF) is a set of security standards payment vendors must abide by to securely design and develop payment software. This protects payment transactions and customer data as well as minimizes vulnerabilities and combats cyber-attacks. PCI-SSF replaced PA-DSS in October 2022.

Tokenization – This security measure replaces a customer’s payment information, such as PINs and card numbers, with a set of unique random characters called a token. Tokenization ensures a customer’s payment information cannot be stolen and stored by hackers during a transaction.

PAR Pay devices comply with the latest PCI PTS security standards, removing all risk and compliance from your day-to-day operations. Additionally, PAR Pay devices and systems are constantly updated to meet current encryption and cybersecurity standards so your brand can grow without the risk of compromise to your customers or business.

Don’t let your brand fall victim to cyber security threats. Fortify your payment strategy with PAR Pay and provide your guests with faster, more convenient, and safer payments and processing.

Interested in learning more about how PAR Pay creates secure payment strategies? Visit us at PARPay or request a demo today!

The post Fortify Your Restaurant’s Payment Security with PAR Pay appeared first on partech.com.

Fortifying Your Restaurant: How A Modern POS Enhances Security and Compliance

PAR Team — Wed, 20 Sep 2023 20:45:08 +0000

In today’s landscape, restaurants are rapidly embracing technology to drive operational efficiency and elevate their guest experience. On average, brands now work with 20 to 30 technology vendors – ranging from POS systems, online ordering and delivery aggregators to loyalty programs, back-office tools, a plethora of digital payment methods and more. Ultimately, this recent technology surge has led to a significant increase in the volume of customer data that restaurants generate and need to manage, making data protection a paramount concern. Plus, with restaurant networks being routinely accessed by numerous staff and vendors within their ecosystem, new challenges have emerged in safeguarding this information. In an era marked by increasing data breaches and cyber attacks, data security is a top concern for IT and technology leaders in the hospitality industry.

Sitting at the core of a restaurant’s technology stack, the POS system is a critical bulwark in ensuring its security and compliance. This is because the POS handles sensitive payment information and acts as a bridge to various third-party vendors, making it a prime target for potential threats and breaches. Data breaches, when successful, are publicly reported and result in reputational damage, loss of customer trust, and financial burdens like lost sales, fines, compensation, and increased insurance premiums.

Therefore, it is essential for restaurant owners and operators to choose a POS partner with strong security features and a proven record of compliance to protect against these risks. In fact, The 2023 Smart Guide to Restaurant Management and POS Systems revealed that 69% of over 300 surveyed restaurant IT decision-makers identified meeting security and payment compliance requirements as one of the biggest benefits of choosing the right POS system.

Key Considerations for a Secure POS Provider

It is crucial to note that not all POS systems offer the same level of protection. Although the prospect of upgrading to a more secure POS might initially seem expensive and challenging, in reality, it is a small price to pay to avoid the above-mentioned consequences of data lapses. So, what do you need to futureproof and safeguard your restaurant’s operations in an increasingly digital world? Read below.

Modern Architecture and Security Features

Choose a POS system with the right architectural foundation. A cloud-native POS is designed from the ground up with optimal security in mind, making it the superior choice compared to legacy systems with on-premises servers or partial cloud configurations. Modern cloud-based POS solutions offer robust security measures, including data encryption, proactive monitoring, and role-based access controls. In contrast, legacy systems often run on outdated, inflexible software architectures and lack the robust security tools needed to combat evolving vulnerabilities, making them easier targets for cyber-attacks, ransomware, and other issues.

Proven Certification and Compliance Track-Record

The increased focus on data privacy has also led to strict regulations like the Payment Card Industry Software Security Framework (PCI SSF), General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). Restaurants must select a POS that enables them to fully adhere to these rules as non-compliance can result in hefty penalties, reputational harm, and the inability to process card payments, leading to loss in revenues.

Legacy POS systems can impede compliance efforts significantly. They often lack the mandated modern data handling practices, struggle with timely updates and patches, and face resource limitations. In fact, this challenge persists even with cloud-based POS solutions, as many of them lack full PCI compliance. To address potential compliance gaps in these cases, especially when managing multiple vendors or disjointed technology, restaurants are forced to invest in middleware or extra technology. This incurs additional expenses and distracts from core business operations.

PAR Brink POS is the cloud-based solution that delivers on these considerations, providing customers with a reliable POS partner that takes a comprehensive approach to security:

Brink POS uses powerful encryption to protect data during transmission and storage, ensuring safe exchanges between the POS system and other components. Unnecessary data is removed or anonymized daily, following industry standards.
To stay ahead of security threats, Brink POS regularly updates its cloud infrastructure and proactively monitors for any unusual activities. It also allows brands to precisely define user roles and staff permissions and enforces multi-factor authentication, reducing the risk of unauthorized access and internal breaches.
For system reliability and in-store continuity, Brink POS uses redundant servers to prevent failures, minimize downtime, and preserve data integrity. In the event of network disruptions, it seamlessly switches to offline mode, ensuring uninterrupted operations and secure data synchronization when reconnected.
Brink POS is designed to meet evolving regulations and holds an industry-leading track record of compliance certifications. It was one of the first to achieve PCI SSF certification, a modern standard for payment software security that builds on PCI DSS. Paired with PAR Payment Solutions, Brink POS also simplifies and automates compliance certification processes for brands. Thus, restaurant operators can focus on running their business instead of worrying about complex paperwork, compliance gaps, or fines.

Interested in learning more about modern POS systems that combine operational efficiency and security? Visit us at Brink POS or Download the eBook now!

The post Fortifying Your Restaurant: How A Modern POS Enhances Security and Compliance appeared first on partech.com.

Fresh Kitchen Increases Speed of Service and Order Accuracy with Brink POS®

Michelle George — Wed, 21 Sep 2022 13:29:31 +0000

In 2021, Fresh Kitchen turned to PAR Technology to deploy a configurable
point-of-sale system that could accommodate both cloud-based and on-
premises ordering—and enable customers to complete their orders in under
60 seconds.

Part of the Ciccio Restaurant Group, Fresh Kitchen is a modern, fast-casual
dining concept offering premium gluten-free, non-dairy, vegan-friendly
bowls and homemade sauces, as well as pressed juices, homemade
teas, and agua frescas without added refined sugars. With 12 locations
throughout the Tampa, Orlando, and South Florida markets, Fresh Kitchen
plans to expand throughout the state of Florida over the next several years.

According to Daniel Meretsky, Vice President and Head of Technology, Fresh
Kitchen “wanted to have the ability to have a Near Field Communication
(NFC) payment option that allows PARPay, Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, and
other payment opportunities, but wouldn’t lock them in to any single card
processor.” Additionally, they wanted a point-of-sale system that could be
deployed quickly, at scale, without compromising quality.

“We wanted to ensure that the system was always on the forefront of
integrations with loyalty solutions and third parties,” said Meretsky. “One
that offered multiple levels of team members’ security and has a very
stable platform. We did an RFP with several companies and PAR came
out to be the one that met all the requirements that we wanted. When we
showcased it to a few of our other C-suite executives they really enjoyed the
PAR Brink POS ® experience.

…

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