Picture it: It’s Friday night after a long week of work. You get home and realize you’re just too exhausted to cook dinner. You also don’t think you feel like spending an hour at a sit-down restaurant. Your stomach rumbles. Clearly, you’ve got to do something. Why not order some delivery? You get fed and you don’t have to get off the couch, save to answer the door. It’s a win-win. This is just one example of how restaurant delivery software is upending traditional dining experiences.
Restaurants are well served when they open their operational thinking to include providing delivery options. According to a recent study by Statista, consumer spending for food delivery was around $30 billion dollars in 2015, with 48% of consumers surveyed reporting that they enjoyed having food delivery options “quite a lot” or “very much”. The numbers mentioned at the 2018 Restaurant Leadership Conference further identified a growth trend in food delivery, showing a 12% growth each year over 5 years and that 60% of restaurants offering delivery showed sales increases.
Optimizing Operations to Align With Delivery Options
Taking, managing, and filling deliveries differs from traditional tableside service. While the basics are still the same (receive an order, prepare, deliver to the customer), your staff and supporting software must be able to identify which orders are headed to the dining room and which ones need to be packed up for delivery. Sometimes, restaurants struggle balancing the two and it can lead to negative customer feedback, dropped orders, or missing items.
This is where integrating certain aspects of the micro kitchen trend can be beneficial. Utilizing modern POS software allows you to create the restaurant equivalent to omni-channel operations, and this is especially effective when a parallel kitchen display system is being leveraged for increased kitchen efficiencies. This presents you with the flexibility needed to run two business models under one roof while meeting the demands of today’s consumer by offering online ordering and delivery options.
This not only entices potential diners but makes it easier for you to determine overall profitability and potential production issues. The advanced reporting available in many next-gen solutions gives you real-time insight into which aspects of your restaurant are performing better than others, including breaking it all down into peak delivery times vs. peak in-house seating times. With this info, you can adjust your staffing accordingly.
Establishing Partnerships with Delivery Services in Your Area
Considering offering delivery? Then it’s time to talk about just how your food will get from Point A to Point B. While the obvious answer may be to order your own drivers, this brings potential risk factors that must be weighed. Insurance costs can be high, you need to make sure your employees are dependable, and they need to be customer service pros. Managing the logistics of orders coming in and being filled while your drivers are out on the road can be overwhelming and give your waiting customers a bad experience.
Partnering with food delivery technology and services presents you with a low-risk, high-reward scenario. Instead of managing additional staff and potential liabilities, you are contracting out delivery tasks on an order-by-order basis. This means you can leverage whichever of your delivery options have the most availability to get your orders delivered. Most of the popular restaurant delivery software, such as DoorDash, GrubHub, or UberEats, all provide a system of reviews and feedback that allows them, and not you, to manage and implement service and training corrections.
These options are effective but require a large amount of coordination between your ordering system, your kitchen, and the delivery outlet of your choice. This will require your restaurant delivery software, in particular, your POS and KDS solutions, to be at the top of their game so that you and your staff can be at the top of yours.
Selecting Restaurant Delivery Software Requires Sound Advice
Manual, legacy POS systems are falling by the wayside in today’s delivery marketplace. Customers expect perfect accuracy, and the costs associated with redeliveries, comped items, and coupons back this up. Your kitchen staff must be able to quickly spot the difference between orders that need to be boxed up for delivery and orders that need to be presented tastefully on a plate for table service. Your hostess or cashier must be able to manage both incoming customers and outgoing deliveries.
An ineffective delivery strategy combined with a full restaurant may lead to customers viewing your establishment as being unorganized, making your slow nights even slower while delivery orders fall to a trickle. That’s why it’s important to have clear, streamlined delivery processes in place so service runs smoothly, no matter how many delivery orders or dine-in tables you have.
Offering delivery can boost your profit margins and increase your customer base but it requires a lot of planning. By retaining a partner that is well-versed in providing modern restaurant software solutions, you can rest assured that any POS solution that is put into place fits the bill of your current requirements and is fully scalable to meet the demands of tomorrow.
Offering delivery in your restaurant requires planning and expert input. When you partner with talech for your restaurant delivery software needs, we devote our time to identify your business challenges and work with you to apply a solution that brings you a concise, POS solution that can meet the challenges of an increasingly omni-channel world. Reach out to us today to sign up for a demo and to learn more about how talech can be your valued POS partner.
