Why Invest in Technology for Your Restaurant Business
The positive fact for any small or mid-sized restaurant is that customer service is critical in making or breaking the customer loyalty to your brand and your business.
In today’s world, smart is the new suggestive. Getting to update yourself and make use of the latest technology to smartly manage your business and operations gives you the edge over your competitors.
Businesses have started moving away from the conventional cash registers, card machines and have moved to computers and POS machines. Just like accounting and legal, every business needs to invest in technology to compete in today’s market.
Technology is both a cost of doing business which leads to an opportunity to do new business.
Why Invest?
Investing in a good technology, a POS that holistically helps you manage and operate efficiently is really important for businesses to scale faster. So let us not beat around the bush and dive into why you have to invest in Technology in the first place.
Online Orders
Online orders have revolutionized the restaurant dining experience. Consider an app that lets customers add food to their cart, there is a 100% chance that the app prompts the user to add a dessert or a drink to the order once the customer is about to check out. By going online, restaurants have the power to up-sell their items more compared to the conventional dine-in experience.
With the demand for online orders going up every passing day, restaurants who have invested in a POS system that is integrated with these online portals seem to have the edge over the others.
Customer Feedback
The restaurants that hear our to customers by responding to their questions, complaints and their other needs have always had a competitive advantage. Today, when the entire customer base is online, it is easy for a bad experience to transform into a bad review.
When you want to go to a restaurant with your friends for dinner, the first thing one does is to check the reviews of the place. So you never know how much of a business that you might lose due to bad reviews.
Any service that the customer likes needs to be marketed and shared online whereas every not-so-good experience shall be discussed within closed doors to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.
Personalized Experience
Knowing what the customer likes and dislikes is really important before you market a product/item to them. With technology, you can capture the order history of a customer during their previous visits and give them discounts on their favorite items.
When a loyal customer is not seen at the store for some time, you can send promotional SMS/mailers offering discounts to their favorite dish or a dessert. These increases repeat customers and customer loyalty. This level of personalization can be done only with the right technology.
Analytics to grow
While a visit to one of the leading cafes in the city, I had inquired about how the sales reports help them. The restaurateur said that their cafe runs an offer every Wednesday (Buy 1 & Get 1) He uses a reports app where he can compare sales on Wednesdays to measure engagement and satisfaction levels of customers. This is just a small example.
Similarly, having analytics lets you get a birds eye’s view on how your business is progressing over days, months and years. Analysing data lets you think not just about running your business but also about growing your business.
Streamline Operations
Wouldn’t it be good if you do not have to log all your item stock at the end of every day, yet getting the work done? Technology is the answer.
With restaurant software coming with features like Inventory Management, Purchase Control, Supplier Management etc., it indeed saves man effort and time in managing the processes. With such tools, the chances of errors are very minimal as compared to manual entries.
Your inventory can be tracked without much deviation and the stock mismatches in terms of damage, theft, and pilferages can also be identified. Now Howzat!!
Online Payments
Gone are the days when people are looking to pay their bills with cash. By scanning just a QR code, payments are done in a jiffy and there are no hassles with the balance change.
These are some of the other statistics that show the decline of COD (Cash On Delivery) which are just prediction but experts say that the downfall in the upcoming years might be severe than projected.
Having a POS system in the restaurant where you can integrate these Online Payments will make your transactions more seamless and easier to track.
With customer trends and preferences going digital, restaurants have to invest in technology to survive in the market. The faster they adopt, the long leap ahead they would be among competitors and will prove to be the differentiator between businesses and successful businesses.
