Pros and Cons: Omni-channel Strategy for Restaurants
Customers expect convenience and consistency from your restaurant across all channels and devices.
The modern restaurateur knows the importance of providing a seamless customer experience.
Customers are demanding convenience in every aspect of their interactions with your restaurant. And it’s on you to provide a consistent brand image and customer journey both online and offline, for dine-in, pick-up, and takeout, and across devices—from browsing to ordering to payment to fulfillment.
The omnichannel approach goes further than the multichannel. It means aligning all your channels and making them work together to provide a seamless customer journey.
That means that however a customer interacts with your restaurant, they will feel cared for and have a consistent experience.
Meanwhile, restaurant tech is booming, and many solutions are on the market to help you reach more customers and integrate customer interaction channels. The challenge is implementing the right systems for your restaurant and getting them to talk to each other.
If you can get this right, you can benefit from the omnichannel approach. It’s easier said than done, though.
To help you find the right balance for your food business, we’ll examine the biggest benefits and challenges of operating a next-generation omnichannel restaurant.
If you can overcome the challenges of managing multiple channels and making them work together seamlessly, you’ll be able to reap the benefits of reaching more customers, providing a better experience to them, collecting more and cleaner data, and using all this to improve your operations and grow your business.
Let’s dive into a little more detail about what that means.
Benefits of the omnichannel approach
Reach more customers
The basic idea is that the more channels you have, the bigger the audience you can reach, especially when you partner with third-party services that each have a large audience of hungry diners.
In the delivery space, for example, partnering with multiple delivery services, such as Uber Eats, Doordash, and Grubhub, allows you to be on multiple platforms and take advantage of their combined reach. While this brings additional challenges in managing multiple partners, there are ways of overcoming them and turning them into positive ones.
Deliverect helps you hone your delivery process to make life easier for your staff and ensure the customer gets the right order, piping hot and on time. It consolidates your delivery orders and sends them directly to your POS. The tickets are then sent to the kitchen in a consistent format.
Get your delivery system nailed, and you will reap the benefits of the combined audience of thousands of local consumers.
Better customer experience
Omni-channel is all about creating a seamless experience across all your channels of interaction with customers. This means the customer will get the same treatment whether they come in to collect an order, dine at the restaurant, or order online via a delivery partner.
Although setting this up and running smoothly is challenging, the result is a streamlined customer experience that delivers on the insatiable modern demand for convenience.
Better data flow
One of the biggest benefits of omnichannel, when implemented correctly with the right integrations between tech platforms, is the clean data it can produce. With multiple channels aligned, you can capture more customer data in your POS, ensure it is accurate, and use it in various ways to improve your operations and marketing.
Here are just some of the ways more and better data can help you understand your customers better and offer a better service:
Personalization to the individual at scale: treat every customer like a regular by understanding their unique preferences and habits.
Target customers with personalized offers to boost loyalty and get referrals.
Continually improve your service, menus, and processes based on the data you collect to offer a better experience for customers and staff.
Make your processes more efficient and cut unnecessary spending.
Happier staff
Putting the right systems in place so that your systems are efficient and your data is clean will foster happiness in your staff and have them work more efficiently with smiles.
As the saying goes, look after your staff, and they will look after the customers.
Happier, more efficient staff will lead to more productivity, happier customers, and, ultimately, more money in the bank.
Omni-channel challenges
Hard to manage multiple channels and third-parties
As mentioned above, when you add more channels, you will likely outsource at least some of the additional work. This means managing third parties, often delivery partners.
The way to get around this is to tackle the problem head-on by building systems that deal with it.
In the delivery space, this is a particular problem. But there are simple measures you can put in place: check our guide to optimizing your restaurant’s design for delivery, for example.
Deliverect offers several features to make managing your delivery partners easier. One of the biggest issues is the time it takes to update menus across multiple partners.
Deliverect saw this problem and built in a solution. You upload your menu to the Deliverect dashboard and make your changes there only once. These changes are then pushed out to all your delivery partners, so you don’t have to get in touch with each one individually.
Bigger workload with more touchpoints
There’s no getting around the fact that managing multiple channels seamlessly will take up more resources. You may need more staff to handle higher order volumes and to manage the multiple avenues through which customers can find you.
You should see this as an investment in improving your business. Creating the right omnichannel system will improve your business in the ways we’ve looked at. And once you have it in place, you can optimize and trim the fat to create a leaner omnichannel machine.
Yes, it will be challenging and require an upfront investment and some risk, but the benefits will surely pay back your investment if you can get it running correctly.
Multiple subscriptions required
One of the downsides of the omnichannel approach is that you will have to take out multiple subscriptions to tech providers. These monthly payments can add up to a hefty bill.
However, this investment in the right solutions is far better than paying for unsuitable tech your staff doesn’t want to use. If you have the right tech in place, the benefits above will pay back your investment many times.
Find the right balance for your business
Despite the challenges of implementing an omni-channel approach, if you can manage to implement it and align your tech stack in the right way, the benefits will outweigh the negatives over time.
Although you will have to overcome several hurdles and invest initially in more staff and the right tech, over time, your bravery and forward-thinking should be rewarded:
You will have better data to reach more of the right customers and continually improve their experience.
You can reach more customers directly and via ongoing promotions and referral programs.
You will provide a better working environment for your team, fostering customer loyalty and building repeat business.
The net result is better systems, happier customers, and more revenue coming in each month.
Deliverect has worked hard to set up key integrations with POS providers, delivery partners, ordering platforms, and payment systems. This, combined with tailored features and a dashboard designed for the modern omnichannel restaurant, means it's uniquely positioned to help you take advantage of the approach's benefits.
