If you’ve adapted to an online food ordering system in your restaurant, you can measure how significantly the scenario has changed with time. Order volume, kitchen operation, and customer satisfaction— all have changed.
However, these changes can backfire if your online ordering system lacks certain features. At the simplest, if it’s not user-friendly, your most loyal customers may switch to your competitors, making you lose business.
So, if you already have a restaurant ordering system or opting to get one soon, learn about these ten key features to have in one place.
-
Ability to Create Customer Accounts
You want your customers to return to your restaurant not once; twice, thrice, and many times more. To do that, you must enable your customers to easily create and access their accounts on your restaurant’s website or app. This helps place and process orders more quickly.
Your customers will create their accounts with the necessary information, such as name, address, contact, and mode of payment. Once created and verified, these data should be encrypted for safety within a high-security system.
-
Enabling Push Notifications
As online ordering systems are making businesses thrive, most food businesses are adapting to it. To beat this competition and stand out from others, your online food ordering system or app must have a ‘push notification’ feature.
A ‘push notification’ will ping your customers every time you have something special to offer. These may include discounts, daily specials, festival offers, loyalty programs, and so on. This will gradually grow your customer base while adding to the business’s bottom line.
-
Flexible and Secure Billing System
By flexibility, we mean having multiple payment gateway options for your customers. Since customers today prefer online payment, ensure your online payment gateway is open to debit cards, credit cards, mobile wallets, bank transfers, etc.
Moreover, the payment gateway must be highly secure. You have to make sure that customers’ payment information doesn’t get compromised during transactions. Leaking of confidential data may not only lead to losing customers but also end up in legal settlements.
-
Flexibility and Customisation in Orders
Your online food ordering app should be flexible enough for the customers to change or update their orders. Let’s say, that if a customer wants to add more items to their current takeaway or delivery order, they must be able to do it.
The same applies to changing the delivery address or mode of payment. Besides, your system must enable your customers to make scheduled online orders.
-
Robust GPS Tracking System
One of the most advanced features to look for in your online food ordering system is a GPS real-time tracking system. With a robust GPS, customers can experience a reliable and satisfactory process, from ordering to delivery. It helps them track their parcel in real-time.
A prominent GPS tracking system also helps the business to locate and deliver food in a stipulated time. It not only ensures delivery efficiency but also maximises volumes of successful order processing daily.
-
Social Media Integration
Social media marketing has become a linchpin in today’s food business, and it’s true for restaurant businesses too. When implementing an online ordering system, make sure to integrate social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc.
Not only do these platforms help promote your restaurant’s brand among target customers, but they also ensure user-friendliness on the customers’ end. Customers can connect to your online ordering app through their social media accounts and help yield user-generated marketing content.
-
QR Code Scanning
An advanced must-have feature for your online ordering system is a QR code system. Integrating this into your system can make customer lives a lot easier. They can scan the QR code to make seamless food orders and payments.
QR codes are also useful for customers to share referrals with friends, colleagues, and loved ones. They can further share it on social media platforms.
-
Device-Friendliness
Most customers today prefer ordering food from their mobile phones. However, a certain number of customers might use tablets or laptops and need to place orders from those devices.
To make things flawlessly easy for them, make sure your online food ordering system works with most device types. Moreover, make sure that your system allows the same users to access their accounts from different devices and place orders.
-
AI or Live Chatbot
An AI or live chatbot is a possible integration into today’s online food ordering system. Whether your customers are ordering on your website or app, you can explore having an AI or live chatbot feature is there.
The AI chatbot may respond to some basic queries while a human staff can resolve problems like complaints, missing items, suggestions, refunds, etc.
-
Order Log or History
It happens oftentimes that your customers want to order something they’ve enjoyed a lot in the past from your restaurant. There could be problems like name confusion, portion size, add-ons, etc. if they’ve forgotten the item name.
Nonetheless, enabling customer access to their order history in the app will help them find that desirable item again and make proper orders. Furthermore, an order log or history can also resolve disputes between the two parties if necessary.
Wrapping Up
So, these are the ten features you can look for in your online food ordering system.
Consider your target customers and the type of food you serve before integrating some of the features. Besides, make sure you’re solvent enough to invest and carry out the charges and maintenance fees of these state-of-the-art technologies.
