Make it a GREAT experience for your customers!
With two working professionals that love good food and prefer not to cook… ordering take-out is a regular occurrence – and always an adventure. We keep about four local restaurants on steady rotation, and each of them has a particular and endearing way of bungling our order.
My favorite Italian place has a POS System that does not have a customer database. This means that when I call in my usual order, I wind up re-introducing myself, and my order, again and again. Sometimes I’m put on hold while the frazzled young server on the phone runs into the kitchen to make sure it’s ok to put broccoli rabe on a pizza. (It is, and it costs $2.25 extra. I know this, but thank her for telling me every time.)
Another favorite place presents its own challenges. My street name, Cambridge, sounds a lot like Kingsbridge, another popular neighborhood thoroughfare. Even when I painstakingly spell it out, there’s still a good 50-50 chance that my food will end up on the other side of town. Inevitably, we get a call an hour later from a frustrated delivery guy standing outside of someone else’s house in the rain – it happens so frequently, in fact, that even though the food is awesome we’ve stopped ordering from there.
I was excited to find out that a new restaurant in our neighborhood had started delivery. I visited their website first, only to find they did not offer an online ordering option. When I called in my order the overwhelmed bartender flatly informed me that I should use one of those generic third party ordering sites. I did, but felt incredibly guilty – I know the owner, and also know that this delivery service can skim profits off the top of each order.
Online Ordering from MobileBytes
Surely there must be a better way?
Call me a curmudgeon, but when I get home at 8 PM, cranky and tired, my favorite thing to do is settle into the couch and lose myself in the void of my smartphone. And my favorite way to place a take-out order is within that comfortable void.
By day, I help restaurants select and implement point of sale systems that improve their business operations. If you ask me, the most underused feature in the systems we install is the free, mobile optimized online ordering system that comes standard with MobileBytes, our cloud POS solution. For restaurants looking for a great way to increase sales without having to add more tables and chairs… this is it.
But benefits for restaurant businesses aside – let’s be honest – my perfect-world MobileBytes online ordering utopian dream is all about the customer. At the end of my day, it’s all about me.
I want to easily scroll through pictorial menus from the comfort of my couch. I want my favorite orders remembered, and my real delivery address sent directly to the restaurant’s POS, not scrawled inaccurately on a piece of paper or sent to a fax beside the register. And I don’t want to go rifling through my purse for my credit card – I want the encrypted payment info kept on file, so all I have to do is click through to process my order.
When I order take-out after a long day, I don’t want to have to leave my couch until my doorbell rings. I want my food there with no hiccups and no extra work (or extra fees, for my friends in the restaurant business). So what if I’ve made it my personal mission in POS sales to make sure everyone knows about MobileBytes Online Ordering? Is letting everyone know that there’s a system out there that can make restaurant customers’ lives better such a crime?
