Three Ways To Optimize Your Restaurant Delivery Technology Solutions - Forbes

2018 saw the restaurant industry bring in over $800 billion in sales, but the way those sales are made is changing radically, with 40% of sales expected to shift to delivery by 2020. This shift has already resulted in upheaval for those chains that haven’t adapted their operations. Meanwhile, those that do recognize and address these delivery challenges will be poised to develop a bigger, more loyal customer base. In fact, 74% of food delivery customers order regularly from the same restaurant, so loyalty is tightly aligned with delivery offerings.

1. Start with quality.

This opportunity to adapt and harness the power of a changing delivery market starts with the quality of food. Soggy fries are a seemingly minor problem, but they could very well be the difference between major success and failure in a restaurant industry that is speeding towards delivery. Many restaurants are utilizing third-party fleets to solve these issues because they cannot offer deliveries on their own. The downside is that restaurants are left in the dark when it comes to each fleet’s performance, food quality and customer satisfaction.

One way that restaurants can mitigate these issues and ensure quality service is by prioritizing deliveries in store with a separate prep line. For example, in order to ensure that a salmon dish is delivered hot and perfectly cooked, those working a delivery-only prep line can place the salmon on a bed of hot potatoes before it’s fully cooked so it completes the cooking process en route to the customer’s door.

Another way to ensure quality is to lower the time delivery drivers spend at the restaurant. By implementing a system that notifies drivers when the food begins to cook — so that they can pick it up as soon as it’s ready — restaurants can ensure both that the food is as fresh as possible and that drivers aren’t left waiting in-store, disrupting the customer experience by making the location overcrowded and noisy. Implementing systems such as these can help restaurants to carve out an edge in an increasingly crowded delivery market.

2. Understand and optimize your technology platform.

Quality isn’t the only important aspect of the customer experience to consider when adapting to the digitalization of restaurant delivery. With the customer experience no longer starting at the store — but rather on customers’ computer screens or mobile phones — and ending when the food arrives at their door, ensuring a great experience and improving efficiency is a must. While that is the goal, most enterprises don't have a good view of their delivery operations and can’t optimize those operations as consumer demand for delivery grows.

Knowing the routes drivers take is perhaps the most important first step you can take toward measuring and optimizing your delivery operations. For example, in order to maximize their earnings, many drivers may choose their routes not based on what is most efficient, but rather on where the best tippers are located. At a Middle East franchise of a chain my company works with, we saw that when drivers were incentivized to deliver in under 30 minutes, all of them hit their targets. The problem? When they added delivery tracking, a very basic delivery visibility feature available on many platforms and DIY solutions, they realized that very few were actually hitting the 30-minute mark. Being able to measure what’s going on is an absolutely crucial component in providing customers a great experience and enabling agility to meet market demands, and it should be one of the first things you look for in a vendor solution or an in-house piece of software.

3. Learn how to manage multiple fleets.

Multiple fleets are the last major aspect of digital disruption — because while they are essential for many delivery options, they also present major stumbling blocks. Restaurants may prefer to use one fleet, but despite this preference, being able to strategically deploy and manage multiple fleets is a major opportunity. For example, a major restaurant chain may use one preferred nationwide delivery fleet, yet in Indiana, where local fleets have a strong presence they might want to deploy a local option. Likewise, the ability to deploy fleets during peak ordering times allows businesses to either augment their own fleet’s capabilities or bolster a third-party provider with another fleet.

Restaurants have diverse needs when it comes to fleet management, but they can take their first steps towards doing so well by making sure that orders are centralized in one location and that delivery is measurable via the same metrics and methods across the board. Setting all of this up and keeping it organized will get you that much closer to multiple-fleet success.  

The shift toward deliveries and the tech revolution it is bringing with it will invariably have a major impact on the relatively traditional restaurant industry. However, restaurants and their customers will both be better off by implementing solutions that ensure food quality, order visibility and efficiency optimizations and the strategic deployment of multiple fleets. Investing in these technologies and deploying them quickly will lead to a better delivery experience, a larger market share and, most importantly, a more loyal customer base.

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https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2019/06/26/three-ways-to-optimize-your-restaurant-delivery-technology-solutions/ 2019-06-26 12:45:05Z