Separate guest & loyalty from the POS and win more catering contracts

There’s a new stakeholder in town. HR has gained a more decisive influence, and with more decisive influence comes more demands. Have you gotten questions like: How can we handle onboarding and offboarding in a smooth way? How can our HR department work actively with food service benefits to increase employee engagement?

In this article, we highlight how you, as a salesperson, in contract catering, can help clients find new ways to increase employee satisfaction and thereby win more catering contracts.

The increased influence of HR

HR has gotten more say and influence at companies as their roles have changed. The process of attracting talent has become more complex and challenging. Employer branding has also become an important concept. In addition, conditions have changed as remote working has become more attractive, and bringing employees back to the office is more relevant than ever.

In short, there are two main things to focus on to get employees back to the office: colleagues and food. Even if many like to work from home, they need to meet colleagues. That vending machine small-talk and lunch break gossip are much-needed pauses from workdays. If companies can offer great food deals, especially in times like this with a recession and rising food prices, that’s essential in getting employees back to the office.

New ways for HR to increase employee satisfaction

The future requires the contract catering industry to broaden its horizons and review more ways to sell food. HR departments constantly look for new ways to increase employee engagement and satisfaction with efforts like remote working, after-work on Fridays, or an attractive food offer. What if HR could utilize your food services in an active way as part of their employee satisfaction initiatives?

Examples of how client HR could work with the offers in your canteen:

1. Make employees feel seen

Surprise colleagues with free lunch on their birthday or, when a team reaches its goals, offer subsidized breakfast on Monday or free drinks on Friday.

2. Support employees in their work-life balance

The canteen chef is left with 50 lunches. Why not package and place the meals in connected fridges so people working in the building can tap-and-grab containers at a good price, and bring them home for dinner,  or open a tiny convenient store where people can purchase necessary items on their way home. That way they get to spend more time with friends and family instead of having to take a detour to the grocery store.

3. Improve health and productivity

Subsidize healthy and green food options for a more productive and happy workforce.

Separate guest and loyalty management from the POS system

The concepts above are not revolutionary, so why is it hard to enable them today? Why is it difficult to answer questions from clients like: How can we handle onboarding and offboarding in a smooth way? How can our HR department work actively with food service benefits to increase employee engagement?

We believe the easy answer is troublesome administration and systems that are not built to fit that purpose. The administration of the guests often sits in the POS system to which you can not give clients access. Instead, the task lands on the staff on site. The admin burden becomes too much if client HR wants to work actively with the canteen offers. An already small margin will become minimal.

There are strong advantages of using a system outside the POS system that will all lead you closer to becoming more competitive on the market, and winning new catering contracts.

Improve client engagement and retention

Apart from empowering clients, there are other benefits of extracting the administration of client users from the POS system. You can for example track how engaged the client is and how profitable they are as a client.

Say a controller at a multi-tenant building with several clients wants to see how a particular restaurant performed during lunch. The restaurant sold 90 out of 100 portions of fish stew in one day. There is no way of telling who did not choose the dish. There is a discrepancy between sales and operations as there’s no way to analyze agreements properly when you use a POS system based on the restaurant, not the client. Today’s POS solutions are built around restaurant profitability and performance, and can rarely answer how profitable individual clients are. It is a challenge that needs to be solved. Insert Pej.

When you see that a client has a weak engagement you can target them and re-negotiate the agreement or suggest new offers that will increase their level of utilizing your food service. This will affect the margins of the restaurant. You as a sales representative can offer benefits that will help clients attract their people back to the office and raise employee engagement.

Let Pej Guest management help you win more deals

The Pej Guest management tool is a food service technology designed explicitly for contract catering. The software allows multiple rules, discounts, rewards, and payment programs per member, and the administration can be done either by you or the client. Adding new sales channels like mise en place, a smart fridge, a self-service kiosk or a connected coffee machine is easy.

What makes Pej unique is that the management of contracts, employees, and who has access is broken out from the POS system. Pej manages the integration with the POS. All benefits are independent and not in the POS system, which means that you, as a salesperson, can work with it alongside HR and all other stakeholders. You can work more clearly towards not losing existing catering contracts and winning more new ones.

Those who were previously stuck in an operational structure can now start tracking agreements and seeing profitability! Pej is the ultimate food service technology for your B2B catering business.