During busy periods your employees can be overrun preparing orders and held up on the phone. As the demand for technology at your fingertips rises, so does the market for providing an online ordering option:
Take advantage of the Smartphone trend and use it to help your business succeed.
1. Competition Customers
Want the most convenient way to order their food. If your competitors are offering online ordering options and you don't feel the pressure to keep up, you may want to rethink. Online ordering is the trend for a lot of needs including groceries, clothing, photos, and gifts; the list is endless.
Big brands can afford to invest a considerable amount of money into building online ordering options, but there are great options even if you don't have a massive amount of cash to spend. Some solutions can be used by developers and non-developers to create the perfect online restaurant ordering tools to keep up with the big brands.
2. Give the customer what they want
The number of restaurant phone orders is decreasing while the number of orders placed online is on the rise. Your customers want convenience, and if you don't offer it to them, they will go to a restaurant that does.
Customers want to pre-order takeouts at a specific time for collection or delivery. This reduces waiting times, and they know their food will be ready when they are. Expectations are high, and customer satisfaction must be your highest intention to retain customers.
They don't want to spend ages on the phone or visit your restaurant after a busy day, wait in line to pay and collect their order. They want to click, click and await their delivery or pay online, walk in to raise, and go home to relax.
3. Improve the customer experience
A smiley employee ready to pass an order over to a collecting customer, or deliver orders with a simple welcome or thank you greeting is so much more satisfactory. After looking forward to a restaurant takeaway all day, it's very disappointing if the restaurant makes an error on your order.
Using online restaurant ordering options moves the responsibility over to the customer to get it right and away from the busy employee who can't always guarantee no room for error. Your staff doesn't want to be bogged down on the phone when they have other jobs to do.
4. Your customer's data is valuable!
Your customers are important to you, and you must learn to gain new customers and keep them. Online restaurant ordering allows you to communicate with your customers on a personal level. Using the information you gather you can tailor promotions to suit individual order patterns. Email marketing is compelling and highly effective.
After gathering data through online ordering, you can customize offers and loyalty promotions to satisfy your customers. Please note you will be required to comply with UK and EU data protection legislation when collecting customer data.
What that looks like once you switch on Ordering.co
Phone orders leave no room to react when a product runs out. With Ordering.co, your team can mark an item out of stock, quick-disable a product, a category, or the whole store in one click, and update hours or pause a service straight from the dashboard or the Merchant app — no waiting on a developer, no explaining to a confused caller that the kitchen just ran out.
Customers can also review your stores, products, and drivers, and your business can reply publicly — a new customer deciding between you and a competitor sees a restaurant that listens. Layer a tiered loyalty program on top so the customers you already worked to win keep coming back for the next order.
"The ability to order online is convenient for your business, your employees, and your customers. Exceed customer expectations with a comfortable experience, assist your employees in allowing them to do their jobs with less room for error, and enhance your business's chance to succeed by keeping everyone happy with online ordering options."