How can Unified Commerce help my restaurant?

22 May

How can Unified Commerce help my restaurant??

In order to provide the convenience required by modern day consumers, omni channel sales have become far more important. From dine in to takeaway and delivery, food boxes, special sauce sales, events and more there are multiple areas that can be aligned to produce impressive results.

Going the integrations route?

The harsh reality is these are often only good for a quick fix being quickly outgrown and lacking in depth or experience, created by knee jerk, profiteering entities. They will also consume you! One recent visit presented a client with 14 separate integrations and 6 other 3rd party solutions with the end result being utter chaos, ballooning costs and very little control in key areas. 14 separate support channels should be enough to put grey in your hair instantly, none of them linked or in reality actually experienced with all the other integrations you are using, I am going to stop here as this is a real spiders web. Lets just leave it as they are often better sounding than the end results.

3rd party feature platforms

We will also touch on the 3rd party stuff. They are usually extremely costly and very damaging to your data collection and ongoing capabilities as an independent location from multiple angles. Whether it is on table bookings or food orders you need to bring that business and traffic back into your control, a prospect that becomes a lot easier within the realms of unified commerce. The answer here is unless you are providing the same level of convenience for your customers, or more, they will continue to use and take up others that do. Having your own full features on your website and in your mobile apps goes a long way to starting the shift, incentivising first use alongside ongoing loyalty point collection can be up to 90% effective in moving people into a, now this really is critical, commission free solution where you own the data and it is not shared or resold under your nose!

Online sales

Your restaurant should be easily capable of selling your own products or merchandise to generate an additional income stream. Done badly you will lose money as the time and effort spent on setup and then ongoing maintenance will often outweigh the sales volume, if you hit the sauce jackpot then maybe not but we don’t sell lottery tickets here.

Most people miss the biggest benefit of this exercise, natural exposure online, for free, to a highly relevant group. In one month alone we have seen multiple bookings made directly from product discovery in organic search results and over 100 food orders, (that’s nothing to do with the product sales itself, just the fact you showed up in a search result, local results are king for restaurants products).

National adverts on TV and the like might now be promoting the major names but who really cares, reallocating some spend into simple local targeted adverts will produce more results for you, national figures show the average foodie uses 4-10 restaurants regularly and 98% of those were within 5 miles of where they live.

More areas

Following on there are plenty of other big areas that once centralised offer far greater data capabilities, reduced management hours, easier reporting and insights into real time trends, driver management, stock/warehouse management, staffing HR tools, online presence and more. This list begins to highlight how many areas will often need tools integrating or other platforms using due to the traditional setup of most locations.

Most of the above, pain points or rants if you wish, are the reason we exist, many of the current solutions and indeed new ones spawned every day, just add to the numbers of things you`ll need to integrate, learn and pay for creating an ecosystem of complacency from top level system providers. All of this funnels into more consumers filtering into 3rd party solutions that then of course, also get integrated, it really is a bit insane.

This is not about beating anyone, it is about controlling them, restoring the balance of power back to individual locations and leaving the big brands to figure out the story with the big brand 3rd party solutions whilst we build our own strong and streamlined locations.