Four operational factors to consider when launching digital ordering

According to The NPD Group, restaurant operators who offer digital ordering, and do it well, are the ones who will be able to grow in this challenging environment.

So what are you waiting for? Implementing the service is a lot easier than you’d think. The beauty of a white-label platform like Preoday is that you don’t need to invest in a lot of kit to get started, and with a few operational tweaks you are able to reap the rewards very quickly.

What do I need to consider?

Integrations

Integrating with your EPOS, payment or loyalty provider will allow your app to communicate seamlessly with your existing technology systems and increase operational efficiency even more. This will also provide a flow of real-time information across your business, giving you a single view to help make informed business decisions. This may mean a change in how you currently manage your reporting, so think about how you would manage this. At Preoday, we understand that running a business is no mean feat; we can manage your integrations on your behalf and your role will be to provide information that we ask for as quickly and accurately as possible in order for the integration to be quick and hassle-free.

Think outside your operational box

It is critical to consider any operational adjustments that you need to make when launching your service. Think ahead about how you are going to manage an increase in sales and manage customer interaction. Some questions you should ask yourself include: Should you create a separate area for mobile/online collection? What should this look like, can it be shelves or does the food need heating or cooling? Who is going to let the customer know they’ve received their order and the time when it will be ready? Take some time to think about what you need to do to adapt your operations.

Marketing

Marketing a new app or service can be daunting, especially if you don’t have the luxury of having a dedicated marketing team. We recommend that marketing your new service isn’t just a launch activity, promoting your app or online ordering service month-on-month is vital to its success. To get started consider simple, cost-effective marketing activities, for example, in-store signage on walls, tills, receipts messages, take-away bag drops, social media posts and promotions to encourage downloads.

Building Loyalty

Once you have launched your service you can use the data provided in your analytics dashboard to build a loyalty strategy for your business. Here you can you can download specific reports of demographics or spending behaviour allowing you to create targeted and personalised loyalty promotions such deals of the day, milestone or personalised deals. From an operations perspective, these are best to be planned in advance to ensure you have the right stock control and offset and allocated budgets to offset the costs.

Ultimately, a successful ordering service enhances the guest experience, deepens customer relationships, drives more revenue and increases profit margins. It’s important to take some time to consider and adapt operations in order to provide the ordering, delivery or takeaway, experience their customers expect.

Download our ebook, to find out more about the operational factors you should consider before launching your online and mobile ordering service.