Restaurant Online Ordering System: A Beginner’s Guide
Planning to have your own restaurant online ordering system is a great way to expand your business and provide superior customer experience. Let’s start the process and put together the system in your restaurant.
If you’re a beginner, you’re in luck. We put together a quick guide to setting up a restaurant online ordering system for busy entrepreneurs who like to get their restaurants online:
Check Your Market
In checking your market, consider the following:
- Your goals
First, you need to identify your goals in setting up your restaurant online ordering system. Is it to drive more sales to your restaurant or offer another option for your loyal customers? Choosing your goals will determine the actions you will take. It will guide you to the right path leading up to your priorities and evaluation later on.
- Restaurant location
Your location will help you to identify the kind of customers you currently have and who you’ll be targeting in your online ordering system. Your customer demographics are very important so that you can personalize your system to suit their needs. Remember, an effective online ordering system should, first and foremost, answer the needs and even wants of your customers.
Your location will also determine the hit rate you will target for your team. Your hit rate is the measurement of the time you’re able to deliver your customer’s order from the time you received orders
- Competition
Check your competition. How many restaurants are there in your area that already have an online ordering system? What app or platform are they using? How long have they been in operation? Consider researching out to your target market as well. Conduct surveys or interviews with a few people. After you get all the data, examine them and include them as your reference to your next course of action.
- Engagement
Assess your current engagement with your customers. Check on how many customers dine in your restaurant on a daily, weekly, or monthly average. Compare this with your competitor data (those who already have established their presence online). From there, you can project your reach when you set up your online ordering system. Your current engagement rate will give you an idea about the improvements you need to make in order to get more customer engagements. Remember your customer engagement is critical to the success of your online ordering system.
Choose a Great Provider
After considering your market you need to look for a great provider to help you set up your restaurant online ordering system. You should choose a provider that offers an affordable yet reliable technology. The app should also suit your type of restaurant and can be flexible. It should be flexible that you can add some features later on like a waitlist or a loyalty program. A great provider that also has a reliable customer service hotline that you can contact should there be any issues as you implement your system.
Great news for you!
Taker is one of these great providers that can help you in your online ordering system.
Prepare Your Restaurant Profile
You need to complete your restaurant profile. Why? It will help you to see areas where you have to improve and your strengths over your competitors. It will also tell you if you’re ready to have your online ordering system.
Your restaurant profile consists of the following:
- Restaurant category
Are you a portion of fast food, casual dining, family dining or a fine dining restaurant? Your restaurant category will determine your approach to your online ordering system. For example, if your restaurant is fast food your hit rate should be less than 30 minutes for orders made near your location. If your category is casual dining you need to add more minutes. Likewise, the looks of your system will also follow your category. If you’re a family dining restaurant your app should show it.
- Management team
You must consider the members of your management team and that includes you. Put the profile of your Restaurant Manager and Assistant Restaurant Managers as well as Supervisors (if any). This will help you determine their skills and the involvement they must take in the success of your system. If one of your Assistant Managers is a graduate in information technology he can help you in understanding the basics of your system. He can also collaborate with your provider development team.
- Sales performance
You need a quick analysis of your sales performance for the past year and months. This is to project your sales target to your team once your system is in place. Your sales should increase after implementing your online ordering system. Project your sales target on a monthly basis, quarterly and yearly. In this mode, you also need to make a review and take action.
Your online ordering system will be a great help in increasing your sales performance.
There are other things to consider under your restaurant profile. You can add them as you see fit we just provided the major things you need to consider.
Menu Planning
Accept the fact that before putting your online ordering system you need to review your menu. Put your best and trademark menu in your system and add more if you can. Quality menu and being able to improve it will help in your success. You need to collaborate with your research and development department so that you can suggest new menu offerings.
A tip on menu planning is that you need to arrange your menu based on your restaurant category.
Check Your Logistics and Supplies
You will be expecting that you will have additional orders once you launched your online ordering system. Check your logistics and supplies. For your delivery orders, make sure that your motorcycles are in good running condition. A motorcycle checklist will help in checking the condition of your motorcycles. Check your supplies inventory, you should add and order your stocks before launching your system.
Train Your Team
Not every one of your team is knowledgeable in your online ordering system. You need to conduct a quick training to your team about it. You can request help from your provider on your training. This is important so that once your system is implemented, everybody can execute well.
Take a Dry Run
In order to validate if your team understand well your training, a dry run needs to be done. A dry run is implementing your system in your restaurant in a controlled environment. This is done to check the level of understanding and correct mistakes of your team before full implementation. You can make a dry run 1 day before the implementation of your online ordering system.
Your next step
Take advantage of an online ordering system with every benefit it has to offer.
Begin your journey today!
If your restaurant is looking for an online ordering system
