Online ordering systems help you grow your business, keep your customers satisfied and increase your customer loyalty. Find out why that is
If you are not taking advantage of online ordering systems for your food business, you are missing out on a huge opportunity to grow and expand.
The internet is the new yellow pages and good online presence can be as good as word of mouth.
If you run a restaurant, online ordering can boost your business intelligence, customer loyalty and revenues. It can to contribute to your business success and give you an advantage over your competitors if used correctly.
So why exactly is it so important for your business to use an online ordering system?
Customer convenience
From a customer standpoint, online ordering enables interacting with your restaurant with greater convenience. This is especially true for your regular customers, those who are going to order regularly are likely to use such systems.
Traditionally if a customer wants to place an order to be picked up or delivered, they need to call in to do so or they must come in and place the order only to wait for the food to be ready. Regular customers may also have to repeat their order for the 100th time.
With the ever-accessible mobile phone, it becomes much easier for customers to see your menu and place an order without having to make a call or wait around which most people would consider harder.
They can also be easily notified when their order is ready for collection meaning no lines.
Customer loyalty
Greater convenience for customers means more re-orders and therefore increased customer loyalty. Greater customer loyalty can be very valuable for food businesses.
Some businesses may be extremely reliant on their regular customers re-ordering especially when it comes to food. Online ordering system’s make it easy for customers to keep re-ordering. It also allows for interesting customer loyalty programs and discounts.
Fewer errors and greater efficiency
Online ordering doesn’t require a staff member to take the order which takes time and can result in errors. Customers can order and review what they select without talking to anyone.
Someone only needs to verify that the order is valid. This means less staff time required to take orders and the avoidance of any potential incorrect orders being taken by staff.
Overall this will lead to a better experience for customers and fewer issues for you to rectify leading to greater operational efficiency. An online ordering system can take 100 orders a second if it needs to.
If your venue gets busy, online ordering can reduce the burden on staff members which leads to numerous cascading benefits.
Improve your online presence
By setting up an online store, you inevitably put up all your important business details such as your locations, contact hours and more. As such an online ordering system, can function as a restaurant website. This means that customers looking for information can easily find it.
One of the biggest complaints is the struggle of finding a restaurant’s menu online which this solves. If you don’t already have a website for your business, this is a great way to get both at the same time.
Best of all being online allows customers to share you around digitally with ease.
Business intelligence & integrations
All the data that you collect from your online orders can be stored and used for business intelligence. The more orders processed digitally the more data you will have.
This includes important information such as what dishes are ordered the most, who are your most loyal customers, what are your most popular times and much more.
Customer data can also be used to integrate with other services such as e-mail marketing platforms to send your customers information on new specials and more.
