Operating a restaurant requires you to manage many moving parts expertly. It can often feel challenging to keep up with continuous change, especially when it comes to restaurant tech solutions.
It’s impossible to keep up with customer demands and grow your business if you’re flying solo. That’s why the most successful restaurateurs work smarter, not harder. They invest in advanced technology to help them increase sales.
Look at what areas cause bottlenecks, where you’d like to automate, and what solutions are available to reach your goals. Here is a list of three restaurant tech solutions you may want to consider for your business:
Geofencing Capabilities
Many restaurant owners have heard about geofencing and its benefits but still aren’t sure what it means. This marketing tool is essentially a virtual geographic boundary. It allows the software to trigger a response when a mobile device enters or leaves a particular area.
When used in the restaurant industry, it allows you to communicate with nearby customers. When a customer crosses that virtual geographic boundary, your restaurant tech sees their presence via location services. From there, the tech solutions send marketing communications to their phones.
These communications help keep your restaurant top of mind and encourage customers to visit you while they’re in the area. When combined with text ordering, customers can immediately redeem your promotions by texting their orders right to you. They can continue going about their day, and receive a text as soon as their order is ready for curbside pickup.
This technology connects seamlessly to make it as easy and quick as possible for customers to order from your restaurant.
Voice Ordering Integration
Text ordering is already on its way to becoming a popular ordering option for restaurant tech solutions. A new feature that is integrating with text ordering is voice ordering. With Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and other voice recognition devices, voice ordering is leading the future of the industry.
In fact, 31% of consumers stated they are receptive to ordering via a virtual assistant, according to a survey from restaurant.org. You’ll want all your restaurant tech compatible with this option, including your digital ordering solutions. Top-of-the-line technology solutions will utilize modular apps on a multifunctional platform to simplify the ordering process.
It’s ideal for restaurant owners to offer both text ordering and voice ordering. These solutions work in tandem since your technology will be able to recognize all the same customer data, whether through text or voice order. You won’t need to sacrifice customer data to appeal to popular demands.
By offering this hands-free option, you make it easier than ever for customers to order from you. For your restaurant, that means you can cash in on those profitable impulse orders and grow your sales.
Dive into Robust Delivery Options
Delivery has seen exponential growth within the past year, and it looks like it will only continue to grow. Because of this, you’ll want to devote more of your resources towards streamlining your delivery service.
It’s, first and foremost, crucial for customer satisfaction that orders are delivered on time and accurately. You’ll want to ensure that your communication, both with customers and between staff members, is streamlined. Invest in digital ordering solutions that cut out the middleman and allow customers to place an order and send it. You’ll also want to ensure your delivery management software correctly estimates delivery times and efficiently communicates those to the customer.
It’s also important to consider the future of delivery. We may be a few years away from complete autonomous delivery being the norm. However, automation can change the industry quickly. It’s worth it to start considering how you might implement these options within your restaurant.
Restaurant owners have only begun tinkering with the possibilities but have already found successful ways to implement delivery automation. One notable method of robot delivery services are vehicles with built-in heating trays to keep food warm until it arrives.
When polled, 69% of consumers would be likely to order from a delivery service with built-in heating trays. 41% would likely order from a restaurant that used autonomous delivery. While 36% would consider ordering from a service where food was cooked and prepared en-route.
These services seem like far-off realities for the average restaurant owner. However, with rapid advancements in restaurant tech solutions, they may become accessible within a few short years. You may not need to implement autonomous delivery even as it becomes more popular. But, keeping your options open for new solutions helps scale your business and meet new customer demands as they arise.
Get Restaurant Tech Solutions from HungerRush
As customer demands continue to evolve, your business must remain agile to keep up. Investing in the right tech solutions will help you with that. HungerRush offers restaurant tech solutions for businesses of any size or concept. We offer various options from text solutions like TextAI to website solutions like Designer.
To learn about what we offer and how it can help your business, consult a HungerRush team member today.