The success of a restaurant business greatly relies upon the food taste and the service quality, but above all, customer convenience matters a lot. People love to get their fine dining experience without affecting the comfortability of their couch. There are numerous physical obstacles between the restaurant and the customer, which complicates the easy food ordering process.
Online food delivery systems have raised the restaurant business up to 300%, and it is the best time to invest in it. To add further to the 60%, U.S.foodies place orders once a week, and the count is supposed to increase. In this case, do you wish to share your profits with the third-party aggregators, or do you want a customized in-house online ordering platform that earns handsome profit? Check out the article and understand why you need an in house online ordering system for your restaurant.
What Is An Online Ordering System?
Online food ordering system facilitate the restaurant owners to access a set of operations such as accept orders, process them, order delivery, offer loyalty points, manage items, and assign orders to the delivery boy. Owning a customized food ordering app nurtures personal branding, which establishes a long-term customer relationship that generates better ROI for your business.
Advantages Of Online Ordering System
The Easy Food Ordering Process - Customers can take their own time to browse menus and place orders without placing calls to the restaurant. 97% of Millennials use their phones to place orders anytime. Thus, the online ordering process streamlines the restaurant process activity efficiently by increasing the sales value per order.
Order Any Time - A customized ordering app offers flexibility to customers to place orders during their convenient time. And this helps you scale the business to place orders, even after the working hours of your restaurant, which schedules easy pickup and delivery time.
Simpler To Manage - Configure daily promotions or change placements of items in the menu done easily eliminates the need to approach third-party aggregators. NPR reports claim, about 4% of online customers spend more money to place a food order.
Fast And Secured Order Delivery - With aggregator apps, quick and hygienic delivery is not guaranteed as they handle multiple restaurant orders, whereas in-house ordering apps reach the customer fast with the compliance of health standards.
Data Insights - Online restaurant ordering systems provide analytics data reports about the marketing campaigns and reward programs which helps to plan the right marketing strategy for your restaurant business.
Strengthens Customer Loyalty - With the third-party apps, customers place orders with your restaurant this time and next time with another restaurant, whereas the in-house ordering app fosters customers to place orders repetitively over your restaurant, which leads to a rise in customer loyalty simultaneously.
Improves Productivity - With online ordering systems, your complete order process is automated, which saves the employee time to attend phone calls to get the customer order such that it increases the productivity of the organization.
Reasons Why You Need An In-House Online Ordering System ?
No More Commission Charges For Every Order
A survey states that restaurants lose 30% of their revenue by using third-party aggregator apps. Restaurants pay a commission charge of 20% in Uber eats, and they also pay additional charges for marketing their restaurant such that it appears at the top of the result. Grubhub marketplace charges 10 to 15% commission charges for 20% of food orders placed from them.
For example, a restaurant receives 22 delivery orders in a week with a sale amount of 636 dollars. Uber charges 190.80 dollars, which shows that the aggregator apps have taken 30% of the weekly earnings of the restaurant. Thus, it's your turn to transform your restaurant profitable using an in-house food ordering system.
Direct Access To Customer Data
Food delivery portals deny access to the customer information, but an in-house food ordering system offers complete access to the customer data. Interact with the customer directly and learn the popular dishes and food ordering patterns of the customer supports designing your menus based on the target customers. Promote offers, discounts, and loyalty reward programs to the customer instantly.
Personalized Loyalty And Reward Programs
Customers who have ordered food from your restaurant already are more likely to place orders repeatedly if they feel good at the first time itself. But as the food industry is competitive, most of the time, customers expect offers and discounts. With in-house food ordering systems now customers get a notification about their favorite meal available at a discounted price for a specific period.
Customers love to view the personalized messages from the restaurant, which motivates them to place the order with the restaurant. When a customer refers to a friend, he gains the loyalty points based on the total purchase amount value of the friend, where the customer can redeem the loyalty points over the next purchase.
Real Time Order Tracking
Customers expect the food ordered should reach their doorstep within a short duration, and the Dominos have viewed their sales increased 20% to 40% because of the live tracking facility. Customer retention depends on the quick delivery of the food and the restaurant service, which indicates the real-time order status transparent for both the customer and the restaurateur.
100% Error-free Order Processing Rates
Online ordering system tracks the kitchen process of the restaurant and finds out how staff members handle food orders efficiently. With the help of the food ordering app, outlet managers never get a chance to face angry customers due to wrong orders or food wastage as every single order gets tracked in real-time. All these factors improve the customer experience by ensuring the branding of the restaurant.
Boosts Restaurant Brand Image
Customized food ordering systems enable the customer to directly access the restaurant regarding any issue with the food or order, whereas using third-party ordering platforms offers no way to hear customer complaints, which creates obstacles in restaurant service improvement.
A techonomic study reports that 76% of customers who encounter delivery errors through third-party apps blame the restaurant for bad service. Even though you don't have control over the aggregator apps, it affects the restaurant's reputation.
Enhanced Customer Service
A restaurant ordering system offers full access control to perform operations by allowing restaurateurs to handle customer grievances with an improved method. Now the dashboard offers the issues faced by the customer with the restaurant and the better way to resolve them. Customer support is the key for any business, so make your customers happy with exceptional service.
Unique Features Of The Online Ordering System
Let us look into the few fundamental features of the in-house food ordering system to boost restaurant sales.
Pre-order - Customers specify the convenient delivery time along with the location during their food ordering process.
Real-time data Analytics - Online ordering system offers holistic restaurant analytics reports of orders and delivery boy transaction that supports restaurant owners to devise better marketing strategies.
Push notifications - Customers receive instant notifications of the discounts and promotions directly from the restaurant that improves the sales.
Loyalty points and reward programs - Excite the customers by awarding the loyalty points for placing an order with the restaurant.
Coupons - Restaurants can launch new menu items with coupon offers stimulating the customer's interest to try the new food immediately.
Multiple payments and gateway integration - Customers can make the payments for their order either by cash on delivery or credit card or debit card, which integrates with multiple payment gateways.
Mobile ordering - Now, ordering food anytime or at any location is no more a trouble for customers.
Summing up
In-house online food ordering systems earn massive profits by encouraging the customers to place more orders and turn into loyal customers. Now, this is the right time to switch your restaurant business from third-party aggregators to a customized food ordering system. Get more orders today!