5 Essential Technologies Every Restaurant Must Have
Owning a restaurant in this day and age is known to be a very difficult business. A lot of restaurant owners often find themselves spending far more than they’re earning unless they’ve optimised their services and are a very successful restaurant. One thing that draw people into a restaurant these days would be some more advanced technologies within your restaurant service to draw people in. If you can catch the eye of a consumer by letting them know there are multiple ways they can order their food or pay for their food or such, then they’re more likely to at least try your restaurant, and if the foods good, come back to your restaurant.
We’ve decided to narrow our list down to the 5 key essential technologies every restaurant must have to ensure that they stand out when it comes to the tech side of things. These suggestions will even hopefully find you a way of doing a previously quite costly process, for a lot cheaper and also hope to help you move into the next generation of restaurant service.
Pre-Orders
A technology that is trending a lot in restaurants at the moment is the ability to pre-order your food. It enables customers to check out the menu via an app or the website, put in their order and then get a rough idea when it should be ready allowing them to simply turn up, eat their food, pay for the bill and leave.
Having the ability to pre-order customers food for them allows them to not have to worry about potentially long waiting times which they may get at other restaurants. This obviously then leads to improved customer service as the customer feels happier about not having to wait or even order their food when they get there, they merely mention their reservation name and sit down, ready for their food to arrive in minutes. It also increases table turnover as you have people coming in for a lot less time, allowing you to fit more people into the table times.
Table Bookings
A technology that you should definitely look into pushing is the ability to book tables via as many different applications on people’s smartphone as possible. With the introduction of the likes of OpenTable and Just Eat, restaurants have seen far more interaction with their customers and much better numbers, allowing them to work out their earnings, finances and table turnover quicker.
These applications can automatically add people’s reservations into their calendar, meaning they are less likely to forget about their reservation or turn up late which is inevitably good news on everybody’s end. In addition, when a customer makes a reservation via an application, they will have a little more information about the customer sich as their name and potential food preferences too, allowing for the restaurant to create a friendlier relationship with the customer, resulting in better customer service.
Payment Offerings
Payments are something that are absolutely blowing up in the smartphone world at the moment with Apple having recently introduced Apple Pay and Google bringing Android Pay to their next iteration of Android too. Ensuring that your restaurant allows for NFC payments is a must and then taking it the next step and supporting mobile payments is also a brilliant way to do it.
If your customer has pre-ordered via a service, you should 100% ensure that they’ve paid beforehand to make the process after the meal a lot quicker and allow them to get away a lot quicker afterwards. If you advertise the different payment options you offer on your website and within applications (if you can) this will also potentially bring new custom for people who want to try that and will always give people less anxiety as to how to pay.
Deliveries
It’s been around for quite some time now but delivering food is a great way to ensure customer satisfaction these days. What better way is there to keep people happy about food than to directly deliver the food to their homes?
There’s also potential yo reach a wider audience as it will open up your menu and food choices to a wider audience of every who owns a smartphone as opposed to those just walking by your restaurant. As aforementioned, people are more inclined to deliver food and try food if it directly delivered to them as opposed to having to go and sit down in the actual restaurant. If they get a sense that the food is of good quality, they may then bring their service to the restaurant itself.
Reviews
Services like Yelp, TripAdviser and Foursquare put your restaurant on a physical map and allow users to see what other people think of your restaurant. We live in a day and age where a lot of restaurant customers in a new town will look for a type of food they want and they go to the restaurant with one of the highest average review ratings. Obviously, you have to have the good food, right prices and good customer service first. But if you’re sure you’ve got this then we’d recommend asking people to review you on one of the big review services.
Some restaurants have begun offering free promotions to those who leave reviews, good or bad. This is a great incentive and something you could easily enforce with a little handout with the bill or receipt.
Conclusion
We hope these tips and tricks to which technologies you should look to be incoporating into your restaurant help you. We hope that after reading this you’ll see potentially what area your restaurant needs to work on and improve and hopefully that will result in positive things for your business. Thank you for reading!