In order to run your restaurant with more ease, and less chaos, order problems, and tablet hell, it’s imperative for restaurant owners and operators to harness the power of restaurant tech to more effectively manage 3 key areas:
- Inventory management
- Order management
- Customer management
Now, let’s dive into each of these areas to see how tech can help restaurant owners and operators more effectively manage daily operations and improve customer service.
Inventory and product management
To start, one of the most important areas restaurants need to efficiently and effectively manage is inventory and product management.
A restaurant’s inventory represents a huge chunk of a restaurant’s budget. However, when inventory is inefficiently managed, product is wasted and money is lost. Additionally, a poorly managed inventory can lead to under-ordering needed product, which hurts kitchen operations and customer satisfaction. On the flip side, over-ordering products only leads to more wasted food and money.
So, what’s the solution to inventory management? An easy-to-use automated inventory management system, like Dash.
With an automated inventory management system like Dash, you can easily keep track of your restaurant’s:
- Current inventory
- Current status of other important products like takeout containers, disposable cups, etc.
- Gain insight into what products to re-order and when
- Gain insight into what products need to be sold/used ASAP
Additionally, Dash offers an intelligent forecasting engine that learns from sales trends, past sales, and upcoming events to predict future sales. If you order too much stock, it automatically guides you to run promotions and sales to use up excess product before it goes bad.
The bottom line? Inventory management is critical to a restaurant’s success and bottom line. Easily manage your inventory with an automated inventory management system like Dash.
Order management
Orders are the literal bread and butter of your restaurant. Most restaurants rely on three kinds of orders:
- In-house orders – customers who dine-in or order takeout at your restaurant counter
- Digital orders – direct orders for pickup or delivery, placed on your restaurant’s website
- Third party service orders – services like DoorDash, UberEats, Postmates, and Grubhub handle online ordering, delivery, and pickup for restaurants.
All orders contribute to a restaurant’s success, but there are a variety of challenges that come along with managing multiple kinds of orders in a restaurant. Unfortunately for the customer, missed orders, duplicated orders, and the slow or late delivery of food are all too often the consequences of ineffective order management.
Instead of manually juggling orders, or attempting to manage multiple ordering systems (and even tablets!) a better solution is an order management system like Dash. Dash is the only Order Management System that syncs activity across all your channels (online, mobile, and third-party apps) in one place.
The bottom line? When your restaurant’s orders are managed effectively customers are happier, staff feels more organized and in control, and management can lead more efficiently.
Customer management
Finally, to improve your customer management, a platform like Dash helps restaurant owners, operators, or managers help track valuable information about customers. For example, Dash can help capture information like a customer’s typical order spend, favored orders, the days or times a customer is most likely to visit, loyalty program points or enrollment, and much more.
By using analytics to seamlessly capture data on your restaurant’s customers, restaurant owners and operators can begin to engage more effectively with customers, in a highly personalized manner. And for restaurants interested in cost-effective, efficient marketing, personalization is key to ROI.
“Personalization is not only a huge digital marketing trend, but the future of business as a customized user experience, tailored to the individual. This will build a relationship with your customers and drive loyalty,” explains the Inbound Marketing Blog. “There has to be more than just using someone’s name in an email. It is about providing a user experience that correlates to that person’s unique interests through relevant offers.”
Personalized customer engagement tactics to test out include:
- Enrollment in a loyalty program
- Enrollment in an email or e-newsletter promo that offers specials
- Special offers or promos, based on a customer’s favorite orders or preferences
- Customized receipts or email messages (i.e. Happy Birthday emails)
- Free delivery on slow days/times
- Marketing efforts that target a customer at their favorite time to order
The bottom line? By getting to know your customer better, you can create offers that target a guest’s specific preferences, spending habits, and needs. A win-win for everyone!
