How Implementing Online Ordering in Your Restaurant Can Be Vital
Many restaurant owners focus on the quality of their food and the efficiency of their kitchens. These are great things that keep diners coming to your restaurant for years to come, but these aren’t the only areas that you need to concern yourself with when finding better ways to attract more business.
One untapped area that some restaurant owners fail to explore is the huge opportunity found on the internet. Your restaurant’s website is just one way to increase your target audience’s knowledge of your brand, but you can go a step further with online marketing and online ordering.
Online ordering represents an excellent idea for restaurant owners to implement for a number of reasons.
Popularity of Online Ordering
More and more restaurants moved towards online ordering modules over the past decade. Online ordering makes it very convenient for your customers to put dinner on the table after a long day at work. When your customers need to order in, there is a good chance that they are going to avoid ordering from a restaurant that requires a phone call for their order and go straight to one that offers an online menu with ordering capabilities.
That way, your customers only have to take a look at the menu, and with a few clicks of the mouse their food will be on its way. If they were to go with a restaurant that requires a phone call, that would be one additional step in the process.
Plus, for many people, there is just an aversion to having to speak to another human after putting in an eight-hour shift. Look at the popularity of text messaging and other messaging applications. People like the convenience of being able to handle ordering their food without having to talk to someone on the phone verbally. Additionally, written or computerized communication for specific orders cuts down on mistakes made by talking to people.
Visually Appealing
Online ordering is vital for your business because you always find ways to make your food more visually appealing to your customers. The menus in your restaurant have professional pictures to tempt the appetites of your diners. There’s a reason your specials and featured items have the fantastic photos.
You can do the same with your online website that offers ordering, only better. Instead of mouthwatering photos of just a few featured items on a physical menu, your online ordering module has the unlimited potential of storing as many photos of your food as you can imagine. Now you can upload photos of your five-course dinner or your simple bowl of soup no matter what the portion size or cost of the dish.
They say that people eat with their eyes before ever opening their mouths. Therefore, dynamic photos of your food provides a way to attract orders from those that are looking for delivery.
Restaurant Benefits
There are numerous benefits that can be had from online ordering as a part of your restaurant’s business plan. One of the first is that it makes your restaurant’s ordering streamlined. No longer does your staff have to put call after call on hold to take orders in a loud restaurant environment where it can be hard to hear the caller. This frees their time up for other tasks that they could be handling instead, such as serving, cooking or seating.
In addition, online orders may increase the amount of an order that customers place. A hungry customer may keep adding food to his or her cart because of the psychology of hunger. When making a phone call order for delivery, there is a good chance that a customer orders the bare minimum without adding any of the extras because they are not really thinking about it. Meanwhile, an online ordering menu puts all of a customer’s options front and center with beautiful photos. More orders and larger orders are a boon to your restaurant as you seek more profits.
Another benefit includes customer service and satisfaction. Customers select their exact choices through online ordering. This reduces errors and increases customer satisfaction with your orders. More happy customers mean that they will be happy to order from your restaurant again in the future, and then they pass your restaurant’s name onto their friends and family as a recommendation.
What This Means For You
Online ordering within your restaurant business is vital to your future successes. The popularity of online ordering among customers really makes it a no-brainer when you’re looking to get more orders, but there are so many more benefits that can be found from adding this to your business plan beyond just convenience.
Customers love the visually appealing format and may buy more than they normally would versus a call in order thanks to your enticing photos. Your staff enjoys not having to take as many orders over the phone when struggling to hear over background noise. Online ordering streamlines your operation, increases your revenue, and enhances customer satisfaction while creating fewer order errors. You can’t go wrong.
Are you ready to explore your options by implementing online ordering into your restaurant today? Contact us at Orders2.me to learn more about how we can revolutionize the way that your restaurant does business.