Optimizing Your Online Ordering and Loyalty Programs with a Restaurant Management System
You’ve been a responsible business owner, despite the turmoil that the restaurant industry has recently undergone. You’ve put new policies in place, and have done your best to prioritize the safety and health of guests and employees. You may be asking yourself: What now?
The best thing you can do for your business is to focus on the programs and tools that will maximize your revenue and keep customers coming back.
Two of the most important tools to focus on should be your online ordering system and your restaurant loyalty program. These are the best tools you have at your disposal to maximize ROI, but you need to optimize these programs in order to do that.
Here’s how:
Create the Ultimate Restaurant Online Ordering Experience
The importance of an efficient online ordering program cannot be overstated, especially in the current climate. Though customers are beginning to venture out more, they are still wary of resuming dine-in activities. Off-premises dining will continue to remain a top revenue-driver for restaurants in the months to come, which means a large percentage of orders will be coming from an online platform.
Because of this, it’s important that you optimize your online ordering platform by investing in a high-quality restaurant management system. This can integrate online ordering with a number of critical restaurant solutions, such as:
Loyalty programs:
Integrating your online ordering system with your loyalty program allows you not only to collect customer data easily and efficiently, but own it as well. You can then leverage it to send more effective, personalized promotions and messaging to the customers that utilize online ordering the most to increase ticket size and ordering frequency.
Kitchen display systems:
An integrated system allows online orders to be sent directly to the kitchen as soon as they are submitted. It effectively cuts back on all the different steps an order has to go through between the customer and the kitchen. Because there is no middleman, you can achieve faster and more accurate orders to keep your online customers satisfied.
Mobile apps:
A restaurant management system easily connects all digital orders and allows them to flow in and out of a single system, regardless of where they originate. If your menu and pricing needs updated, you can make changes and have them reflected on your website and mobile app at the same time. This also streamlines data collection and makes it easy to aggregate data across systems.
Pickup and delivery:
An integrated system can track an order from the time it is placed online to the time it is delivered on the customer’s doorstep or picked up from the restaurant. When you integrate your delivery software, you can have more control over your orders, getting them to customers faster and with more accuracy. The same goes for curbside pickup.
POS and reporting:
Without an integrated restaurant management system, business owners must manually collect online order data from their website and app, and then combine it with the rest of their sales data. This can lead to inaccuracies and can consume valuable time. With an integrated system, however, all data lives in one place. You can easily pull reports and real-time data on-the-spot, helping you make more informed business decisions.
Request a demo and get ready for the rush.
Keep Them Coming Back with a Restaurant Loyalty Program
An efficient loyalty program is necessary for restaurant owners who want to stay competitive. It is one of the most effective ways to build solid relationships with your customers and keep them loyal to your business, which is the ultimate goal for all restaurant owners. You should be utilizing your loyalty program to build trust and strengthen communication with your customers.
It’s no longer enough to have a simple punch card. Your loyalty program must be fully-optimized for the biggest impact. That means it needs to be integrated with your restaurant management system, so that it can communicate with the rest of your critical software, like:
Online ordering and mobile app
Members of your loyalty program can log in to their accounts online and view their loyalty reward status online and via app. They can also redeem their loyalty rewards points at the same time. When loyal customers can log into their accounts, you are better able to collect customer data no matter how they order.
By collecting online ordering data, you will be able to better cater to these customers, and can create more profitable, personalized promotions. So if you have a customer that ordered a pepperoni pizza last Friday at dinnertime, you can easily send a personalized offer for a BOGO deal on pepperoni pizza this Friday at 5 PM to encourage a repeat order. If the customer has your app, you can even send it via push notification to stay top-of-mind.
Reporting and POS
When you integrate your loyalty program with your RMS, you can collect and manage customer data so that you’ll be able to better connect with them. You’ll have the visibility you need to identify your best customers by frequency and spend, so that you can create more personalized offers that lead to higher sales.
An integrated system also makes it easier to enroll customers. They can enroll in your program right at the POS when dining in, or online when placing an order. Staff can be trained to encourage and help every dine-in customer to become loyalty program members. Once enrolled, customer information is automatically saved, and is now accessible across all locations and platforms, physical and online.
Rely on an Integrated Restaurant Management System
To remain ahead of the competition in an industry that evolves so rapidly and relies so heavily on technology, forward-thinking restaurants require the powerful tools that a restaurant management system provides. This can give you access to software that allows you to appeal to the fluctuating demands of today’s consumers, and can integrate your business tools in a way that allows them to work together as a single cohesive unit—maximizing the results and the return on investment for each solution.
The result? A customer experience like never before.
Interested in finding out more about a restaurant management system that provides accurate, real-time data to help you make better business decisions and optimize both on- and off-premises sales? Request a demo with HungerRush today.
Looking for more ways to prepare your restaurant to reopen? Check out some of our additional resources here: