As the COVID-19 crisis threatens the health of your community, it has become imperative for restaurant owners such as yourself to make critical decisions. While you need to stay operating in some capacity throughout this crisis to keep the bills paid and the payroll going, you must also ensure the safety of you, your family, your staff, and the surrounding community. You need to take decisive action, and fast, but how?
Addressing this sudden shift in restaurant operations has required many to set up an online ordering system. This is an action that will empower you to face this challenge head-on while building a forward-thinking model that will carry on long after this crisis has ended.
Setting up an online ordering system is a process not to take lightly, even if your initial reaction may be to implement it and fix it along the way. This is ill-advised from a variety of angles, including adding stresses to your staff and customers that are simply not needed. You can accomplish a quick rollout of online ordering by following a handful of steps. This ensures that you remain true to your brand, while still providing your community with an important service.
Selecting the Right Solution Solves Problems at the Start
Feeling pressured for time or money, restaurateurs too often will turn to freeware or shared solutions that do not provide the full level of features needed to be successful. You must ensure that any online ordering system you choose is fully capable, is easy to use, and is a breeze to manage.
A critical first step in your process must be to seek out the expertise of an experienced POS software consultant. They will guide you through the important infrastructure that ensures that your online ordering system seamlessly integrates into your POS and KDS systems. Also, your POS consultant will steer you around any known obstacles or problem areas so that you can achieve the perfect blend of an amazing ROI and a feature-rich solution.
When selecting a POS partner, one important feature to seek right away is a solution offering that gives you everything in one, easy to manage, system. An innovative POS platform will deliver the ability to easily integrate online ordering directly into your business processes while ensuring the integrity and consistency of data throughout the restaurant. This becomes game-changing when combined with these next steps.
Your Customer-Facing Interface Is the New Face of Your Restaurant
Perhaps one of the hardest ideas for a restaurant owner to grasp is the shift from the restaurant atmosphere to an online interface as being the face of their brand. As you make the move to online ordering, you must focus on a solution that gives you a fresh, simple, yet engaging interface for customers. You do not want customers to have to dig around for a menu or make it overly complex to select their items or to checkout.
The interface you present should not force you to create a website or to change how you manage your social media presence. Instead, you want the ability to use an app that is directly tied to your POS platform. This will give you a decisive edge in the online ordering space through the ease in which you can manage the customer experience. It will also do wonders for your brand, as customers will feel as if they have full control over their experience with you.
The simplicity in how this can happen is energizing. Menus can be imported or changed directly in your POS system. Then, you can easily replicate this to your customer-facing app, making it easy for them to see daily menu changes or new specials that you are offering. Add to the mix the ability for customers to pay using digital wallets in addition to credit or debit cards, and you have a perfect recipe to keep your customers coming back for more.
Create Internal Opportunities for Process Improvements and Staff Readiness
The establishment of an online ordering system will provide you with some key improvements in how you conduct internal tasks. Efficiency gains will be immediately seen in the kitchen, as orders flow with ease from customer app, into your POS system, and onto your KDS. Order status is kept current and gets reported back to your delivery drivers, order coordinator, and customer without any actions needing to be performed.
You can use your online ordering system as a way to keep displaced workers employed. Waitstaff, servers, and your host or hostess can all now be deployed as delivery drivers. This keeps the backbone of your restaurant working, cuts out the expense of using contracted delivery companies, and keeps your staff at the ready for when your doors can once again be opened to the public.
We Can Help Set Up Your Online Ordering System
Setting up an online ordering system as a direct response to our world’s current, and very fluid, circumstances requires a high level of expertise from the start. You do not have the time to get it wrong, nor do you have the time to conduct the research required to pull this off on your own. This is a time where a valued POS partner must be at your side; one that brings in-depth knowledge of merging POS trends and demonstrated knowledge of the restaurant business.
We offer customized, next-gen POS solutions that offer you the online ordering capabilities you need today. Our consultants know exactly where to look within your operations so any solution provided fulfills all of your needs. And, our in-depth and personalized training empowers your staff to take their productivity to the next level. It is by working together that we can all emerge on the other side of this safe, healthy, and with lights shining bright.
We at talech want to assist customers that have been financially impacted by COVID-19, in light of restricted movements in cities and towns across the country. We have launched a number of initiatives to help customers during this time. Click here to find out more or reach out to our Support Team at support@talech.com
