Use Digital To Transform Your Restaurant and Food Services

As a result of digital transformation, the global restaurant industry has transformed over the past decades. Embracing technological advancements has allowed many restaurants to enhance efficiency and meet consumer demands in an increasingly digital age. Digitalization in restaurants can be seen in both the online world and physical restaurants.

When it comes to physical spaces, the ways that embracing technology has helped restaurants’ physical spaces run more efficiently are by using digital menus which can gather useful customer data, reduce labor costs, and lower the number of incorrect orders. This feature of restaurant services became especially important during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic due to health and hygiene concerns making personal interaction between restaurant workers and customers less possible. Restaurants have replaced physical menus with QR codes, a change that many in the industry believe is likely permanent. The coronavirus pandemic ushered in the instantaneous, widespread use of QR codes, but restaurant industry experts think that the technology will stick around long after the health crisis ends.

Digital Menu is a digitized version of a restaurant menu available to your customers via QR codes. Customers visiting your restaurant can scan the QR codes from their respective tables via their smartphone cameras.

Menus are an important tool for communicating with customers and influencing their behavior in restaurants. They serve the same purpose as a business card in terms of introducing the restaurant to the customer. The menu’s design is in keeping with the restaurant’s decor, service, food quality, and price range. It’s also one of the most important strategic tools for a food and beverage company. It aids in the control of marketing and sales costs.

According to Square’s Future of Restaurants 2021 report, 88% of restaurants are considering swapping digital menus. The digital restaurant menu has an upper hand over the traditional restaurant menu for various reasons. Since most of the restaurants are automating their restaurant operations through robust restaurant management software, it is easy to make the transition as well. The main reasons why the shift to the digital restaurant menu is a must are:

With a digital restaurant menu, people get the liberty to choose their favorites and place their orders. As people will be ordering on your restaurant app, you can reduce your overhead costs by freeing your staff to entertain your guests. Not only this, but your customers can also pay digitally via your restaurant app.

Not only will this reduce your need to tap the right restaurant staff, and then train and retain them, it will also reduce the scope of mistakes while order taking and the instances of misplaced orders. Since it is your customers who are placing the order the possibility of sending the customers a wrong order would be nearly negligible. The digital restaurant menu is a highly accurate system and leaves little room for mistakes.

When a digital restaurant menu is integrated with your robust POS systems, all changes on the menu relating to the menu items and the pricing can be managed remotely so that either all or only the selected few restaurants (if it is a chain) gets it updated on the e-menu.

The digital restaurant menu is highly beneficial for your restaurant since it will enhance your entire guest experience. With a stellar HD photo displayed on the tablets, it would allow your food items to appear more attractive. Your digital restaurant menu will also be equipped to suggest food items to customers according to what they have been browsing or point them to the more popular dishes for that week. This implies that your digital restaurant menu will be able to provide a personalized experience to your customers.

It will even help to lower customers’ estimated wait time. Hence, it gives customers a reason to look at the screen for more than the expected time, and correspondingly this provides the restaurant with another chance to slip in promotional or other branded content. Overall, it ensures that you maintain a healthy conversation with your customers throughout their stay at the restaurant, while they eat or wait for the food to be served.

Unlike a traditional static menu board, costs can be reduced by diminishing the need to design, print, ship, and reprint menus whenever promotional items are added to the menus. Once you have your digital restaurant menu designed, installed, and integrated with your POS, maintaining it is as simple as uploading pictures and posting on any of the social media platforms.

Since a digital restaurant menu can be easily edited it allows your café or restaurant to be dynamic in your offerings — for example, tweaking your food to adapt to any latest trends or any seasonal festivities.

Tracking data is extremely essential for all businesses and hence restaurant business is not an exception. Having a digital restaurant menu will help you to automatically track which dishes were popular for the week, and even help you track the exact time when the said dishes were sold the most.

Having such data in hand, you can easily forecast for such future demands, to ensure that your kitchen never runs out of stock during the estimated time period and hence preventing your restaurant from losing valuable business. This will not only help you to order just what is needed but too in the correct amount and correspondingly reduce the kitchen waste generation and the input cost involved in purchasing the raw materials.

If you have a chain restaurant or have several franchisee outlets, and if you are unable to physically be present at your restaurant it is highly recommended that you have a digital restaurant menu that is integrated with your restaurant POS. Maintaining consistency is highly important whenever you are running a chain restaurant or a franchise. And most of the time it is seen that a franchise might just start selling items other than the prescribed items since the owner is not physically present in the outlet. In order to protect yourself from any such situations, you must have a digital restaurant menu since you can remotely check on the items sold. Moreso, since it is integrated with your restaurant POS, none of your restaurant chain outlets can sell items behind your back other than the ones which are priorly fixed.

Upselling is an art that not everyone is able to master. While upselling is a very integral part that helps your restaurant to garner that extra bucks, training your staff in effective ways can be tiresome. Don’t worry! Digital restaurant menus can come to your rescue very effectively. These digital screens display complimentary items, once you have these restaurant digital menus integrated with your POS. Compared to the static images in your traditional menu, the HD screens give your viewers a much better and cleaner look. Burger King, in 2010 deployed digital menu boards across London and Birmingham locations, resulting in a 64% rise in sales in just 12 months.

With the massive technological development and its sprawling impact on the restaurant industry, if you stick to the traditional static menu boards, you will be losing out on a lot of potential customers to your competitors. In order to streamline your entire operations, it is highly recommended for you make that quick shift to the digital menu boards.

Got inspired by what we wrote? Feel free to contact us for more information and a free consultation: [email protected].

REFERENCES:

Article: 7 Reasons Why You Should Switch To a Digital Restaurant Menu by Posist