eMenuCHOICE adds reservation capabilities to its POS application
eMenuCHOICE, a leading dining management and point of sale (POS) application for senior living communities, now offers reservation features that support communities’ efforts to reopen communal dining.
For the past several months, senior communities have placed restrictions on communal dining due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Most have limited dining to room delivery and in-room dining. As communal dining reopens, communities are developing policies to allow for social distancing, limiting both the number of residents in dining areas at a given time and the length of time for meals.
To help senior communities adapt to these changes, eMenuCHOICE has added new reservations features that enable communities to support social distancing requirements and implement best practices for communal dining.
"In speaking with communities over the past several months, it was clear that a tool was needed to assist with the reopening of dining rooms," said Matt Stenerson, President and co-founder of eMenuCHOICE. "Our reservations features will support best practices for communal dining, as well as increased service levels in the future."
eMenuCHOICE Reservations enables a community to:
- Assign seating times and capacity limits for each meal period
- Take reservations by resident name
- Capture resident contact information for confirmation and notifications
- Set start time and duration of reservations for specific meals
- Add, remove, change and combine patrons within a reservation
- Seat patrons at a specific dining room table
- View overall reservations, pacing and distribution by day and meal
- Take reservations in advance
With eMenuCHOICE, reservations are quickly and easily entered from any connected device by authorized users, allowing staff to add reservations over the phone or in person.
"When we get back to communal dining, it won’t be quite like it was before," said Mikel Rogers, Director of Food and Beverage at Leisure Care LLC. "If we have buildings with 100 residents, we might seat 25 at 4:00, 50 at 5:00 and 25 at 6:00. We need something we can track that with and it has to be user friendly, not just for the food and beverage teams but also for the residents."
Lynsey Wetzler, a dietitian and Regional Director of Nutrition and Culinary at Cassia Life, looks forward to using eMenuCHOICE Reservations features to manage the flow of nearly 200 residents at one assisted living community. "We hope to be able to manage the [dining experience for] residents that want to eat in the dining room, while still keeping to the social distancing guidelines and ensure we are able to keep people six feet apart," Wetzler noted, "However, we can only handle a maximum number of people in the dining room at any one time. We need a way to achieve that."
"I see eMenuCHOICE as a pretty valuable tool in our dining process and want to use it to our fullest potential," added Marc Weber, Regional Culinary Consultant for Ebenezer. "These additional tools will help us better serve our residents as we navigate our ever-changing dining programs in these unprecedented times."
Designed for senior living communities and aimed at helping reopen communal dining, eMenuCHOICE Reservations can also be used to support non-dining venues such as salons and spas, enabling residents to reserve haircuts and other personal services in advance. Additional uses might include reserving transportation to medical appointments, apartment cleanings or other services communities might offer residents.
eMenuCHOICE is an award-winning application built exclusively for senior living communities that promotes choice and greater satisfaction among residents; improves communication between residents and staff; and increases efficiency by using mobile technology for real-time ordering, fulfilment and billing. For more information or to request a personalized demo, visit https://emenuchoice.com
