Picture this: You’re working a pizza counter on a Friday night. Orders are coming in non-stop when the unthinkable happens: The point-of-sale (POS) system freezes. What little troubleshooting you know gets you nowhere and the tried-and-true reboot doesn’t work either.

You and your coworkers scramble to write down orders on scraps of paper. You collect payment without a working register. You call for help from the manager. You need technical support to fix the system. 

Nothing works like it should and the single breakdown compounds into multiple points of failure. Orders are delayed and customers annoyed. Employees do their best to shoulder the burden.

You can’t operate a modern business without technology. Nowhere is this more clear than with businesses like quick-service restaurants (QSRs). These businesses have razor-thin margins and exacting expectations of customers. Errors mean lost revenue and damaged brands.

Restaurant tech malfunctions, such as with a pizza POS going down, may seem minor problems. But when they happen regularly, they become a thorn in the side of your customers’, a blow to team morale, and ultimately, a drag on the bottom line.

A Day in the Life of an Employee with a Broken POS

Scrambling to handle a POS crash is an all-too-common reality for restaurant employees. Let’s return to our pizza example, and see what frontline reality looks like for Domino’s Pizza employees.

Spend a few minutes browsing r/Dominos, and you’ll find Reddit posts by Domino’s Pizza employees detailing their frustrations with the company’s Pulse POS system. Here are a few common complaints:

1. Long Wait Times to Reboot Systems

Employees describe having to contact support to restart the POS in the middle of a rush, leaving them helpless while customers wait.

2. Resorting to Old Tech to Take Orders

When the system crashes, some employees report using a dated system to keep orders moving, sacrificing delivery directions and car-side orders as a result.

3. Old Features and Glitchy Updates 

With two Pulse generations in use across Domino’s stores, employees run into problems when their POS is not current — or when their newly updated POS fails to carry over context from the old one. Take this story of a lava cake promotion gone sideways:

When these issues arise, customer anger is often directed at employees. Workers become the face of the problem, absorbing frustration over delays they can’t control.

All this adds up to chaos and stress. Errors become more frequent, orders get delayed, and the entire operation slows down. Over time, this kind of pressure contributes to burnout and turnover. Though these costs are hard to quantify, they have a huge impact on a restaurant’s long-term success.

The Root Cause: Outdated Systems and Reactive Management

After reading the stories above, it may surprise you to learn that Domino’s has invested a great deal in its POS systems and is a leader in digital innovation for quick-service restaurants. To be sure, Domino’s Pulse POS and its associated technologies represent impressive technological accomplishments. 

So, why do these failures keep happening, both at Domino’s and across the industry? 

With complicated, integrated systems, a whole lot can go wrong. Aging technology may be partially to blame, but a lack of proactive monitoring and management hurts too. When restaurants don’t take the steps to quickly catch and address POS issues, problems become chronic. Unfixed problems become “business as usual.”

Monitoring and maintaining a POS system leads to regular firmware and software updates, standardizing configuration management, smart hardware and network monitoring, and much more. RMM supports the lifecycle of the POS system. When it comes time, switching to a new system can bring downtime as employees learn the new technology and technical teams learn to support the new POS system. 

Even strategic rollouts come with interruptions, which can make restaurant owners hesitate to rock the boat. In 2021, Domino’s updated its Pulse POS to both enhance the system and rebuild the architecture to more easily handle continued updates. As we learned from the employee whose POS failed during the lava cake promotion, this update wasn’t perfect.

These challenges won’t go away. But by understanding the support requirements of existing and new POS systems, a stance of proactive management becomes possible.

The Solution: Proactive Management and Employee-Centric Design

The best technology is designed by always keeping the users of the technology in mind. In the case of pizza places like Domino’s or global franchises like McDonald’s, employees are often the heaviest users of restaurant technology. How do you keep their experience front and center?

Technology That Works for Employees

First, you must ship technology that works. Whether fryers, mobile ordering devices, or digital menus, employees shouldn’t need to be technical troubleshooters during peak hours. 

In the case of a POS system, the technology should:

• Feature intuitive interfaces that reduce the learning curve for new hires. Smart systems can enable new team members to confidently take orders on their first shift because the layout is as simple as using a smartphone.
  
  
• Use automation to recover quickly from downtime, minimizing disruptions. A remote monitoring and management system can automatically detect hardware glitches and reboot in seconds (instead of forcing employees to sit on hold with the support hotline during a dinner rush).
  
  
• Include support options to address issues as they arise. Companies should consider a setup where employees can access instant technical support — for example, via a live chatbot trained on common issues with the system.

Proactive Monitoring and Preventive Maintenance

With the right tools, you can identify and address potential issues before they lead to a disruption in operations during peak business hours, as with our Friday night POS snafu at the pizzeria. Remote monitoring and management tools help employees do their jobs by eliminating unexpected device downtime (and connected product malfunctions). 

For example, making sure mobile ordering devices have healthy and charged batteries means drive-thru employees don’t have to worry about a device dying mid order. Or, think about a kitchen printer monitored for connectivity so that orders aren’t lost due to an unnoticed failure. 

By solving problems proactively, before they snowball, businesses support predictable, efficient workflows. In the long run, these standards enable restaurant owners to maintain profitability and a strong reputation. 

Software can help companies deliver a better employee experience. In the case of connected products at restaurants, businesses can use remote monitoring and management, as with Canopy, to manage point-of-sale systems and other restaurant technology at scale, either reactively or proactively. 

At Canopy we’ve helped teams spend less time troubleshooting and more time delivering great service. If you want to see this approach in action, check out our case study with point-of-sale provider Revel. 

Or bookmark our Remote Device Management Guide to further understand where RMM for connected products fits into your tech stack (like point-of-sale systems, cameras, kiosks, digital signage, and more).

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The Business Case for Employee-Friendly Technology

Investing in a reliable, employee-centric POS system makes good business sense. Happy employees are more engaged, provide better service, and stick around longer. They don’t have to turn to subreddits to fix technology on the job. 

And when your team thrives, your customers notice.

If your current POS system feels like it’s holding your team back, consider examining how you monitor and manage that system. Talk to your employees about their pain points. Or see how others in the industry manage their restaurant technology — for example, Chick-fil-A, which manages its endpoints through custom edge computing using Kubernetes.

Technology is central to how modern restaurants work, which makes keeping the technology working as it should mission critical, no matter the food served.