“Embracing technology to increase sales – How to make the most of all the digital channels available”
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Nick Hucker, Preoday: Dan, can you give us an indication of how much of your business you’d say is “digital”?
Dan Houghton, Chilango: Right now, I’d say three of the eleven restaurants are digital if you take them by sales. All the restaurants are on multiple digital channels, but if you just go, right, how much business is online, it’s basically three restaurants’ worth. So just under 30 per cent of all sales coming in digitally now, whereas it was zero two and a half years ago. We do a very high volume in the city. We will serve six hundred people in two hours and also have a good delivery trade, with some residential.
Nick Hucker, Preoday: What sort of tips would you give to some of the operators in terms of putting it all together from a technology integration point of view?
Dan Houghton, Chilango: We have an EPOS company that is prepared to do integrations. So, we have an API where we pull out all the data from that, which goes into our data warehouse daily. We have a direct integration with Deliveroo, straight into our EPOS and straight into our data warehouse. Critically you want an EPOS provider that is able to integrate with a range of other providers and you want them to be doing that for all their clients, not just you. The EPOS is integral to making the integrations work. The primary source of truth for us is the EPOS database, which has everything we need [on sales and stock].
Nick Hucker, Preoday: What advice do you have for operators who are finding all of this very confusing?
Dan Houghton, Chilango: I think you’ve got to embrace the fact that this is a consumer-led change. You know I’ve heard so many people at conferences, especially operators, who hate all this kind of change as they see it is damaging either hospitality or in a sense, destroying their margin. It’s just too late. We’ve got to deal with it. This is consumer-led, and you can’t swim against the tide for very long. You have to embrace it but avoid picking a winner. Lastly, I would say you don’t have to just use third parties, you can use white label, but you have to get behind it and really push it. You’re going to get behind it and really work on pushing back because consumers are being bombarded by opportunities to order from a third party every day and just to get them to use yours and to sign up requires effort. But I think it’s worth it because you start to get a better feel for what the relationship is.
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It’s not as catchy as: ‘When is a door not a door?’ (answer, when it’s a jar) but it speaks to the idea that in-car collection, and the technologies that support it, are flexible enough to bend to the needs of a business and its guests.
Delivery can be daunting to the uninitiated, and it might be tempting to sign up with a third-party ordering aggregator that offers the service, such as UberEats, but other options could suit your business and brand better. Here we present three different ‘levels’ of delivery, starting with the most basic – and cheapest method: doing it yourself.
