The mobile consumer presents a tremendous opportunity for restaurant operators. Recent National Restaurant Association (NRA) research found that 43 percent of adults say they’ve used the Internet to place an order for takeout or delivery. Nearly 60 percent of adults have visited a restaurant’s website, and 58 percent have viewed a restaurant’s menu online. Most of that online activity is taking place on smartphones while consumers are on the go and making their mealtime decisions. NRA’s research indicates that 52 percent of U.S. Internet users would likely use a smartphone or tablet for ordering takeout and delivery if possible. That figure climbs to nearly three quarters among the millennial population.
Ignoring the sales lift enabled by affording what’s poised to become a standard consumer convenience is no longer an option. If you’re not taking orders online, you’re losing orders to your competitors.
As is often the case, however, capitalizing on this opportunity isn’t achieved without challenges. Until very recently, restaurant POS systems weren’t architected to discern online orders from walk-in, reservation, or phone orders. The POS simply transmitted generic order data to Kitchen Display Systems (KDS), and it was up to restaurant personnel to prioritize, label, and sort those orders out.
That’s put restaurant operators in a quandary. Organized and accurate food order management is key to the customer experience. But, unless you’ve very recently upgraded your POS and KDS to an enterprise platform with fully integrated multi-sourced ordering, configuring your systems to manage the growing influx of online orders, and managing the customer’s experience in receipt of those orders requires heavy and expensive integration work at best. To date, enabling online ordering, making sense of order origin (online, inline, phone) and managing/labeling orders appropriately at the POS and printer level has been a complex, pricey, and disruptive proposition. Ignoring the opportunity, on the other hand, is pure folly in light of the overwhelming evidence that your customers want—and will exercise—order flexibility.
