By Zhong Xu, Co-founder and CEO, Deliverect
Over the past five years, food delivery services have steadily grown in both popularity and most recently necessity, with many restaurants rising to meet the demand. A primary reason is that diners love the perfect melange of restaurant quality and at-home comfort that food delivery offers. About one third of individuals aged between 18 and 24 eat takeaway and delivered food several times a month in the UK alone (Statistica, 2020).
At Deliverect, we’ve seen this come to life as we’ve helped to process an average of more than 1.5 million orders per week this past year. That’s a 750% increase from the year before. But as beneficial as delivery services can be, behind-the-scenes details like last-mile logistics can be expensive and challenging to manage.
It’s clear that digital solutions have helped restaurants better serve their customers and adapt to life in the new normal. Online ordering is here to stay – so implementing the right technology in restaurants is crucial for helping to create an excellent at-home dining experience for your customers.
That’s why this past month we introduced a new suite of products to help our customers enable further growth and empower control within the competitive hospitality landscape.
We’re excited for more restaurants to have access to top technology that enhances day-to-day and delivery operations. Any updates that make our platform operate more seamlessly for restaurants is a win – our team is motivated by helping the hospitality industry continue to succeed and thrive after a tough year. Let’s take a look at some of the new feature and how they’ll help restaurants to continue thriving:
Deliverect Insights: Deliverect Insights offers upgraded dashboards that allow restaurants to utilise their data more extensively, answering key questions that will enable them to see how their performance is trending on delivery platforms and to spot outliers. Insights offers three sub-sections:
- ‘Menu Item Performance’ allows restaurants to compare products and identify the best and worst performers.
- ‘Location Performance’ enables restaurants to gather insights surrounding the performance of individual locations and generally understand performance over time.
- ‘Channel Performance’ helps compare channels, easily identify best selling items and see how sales fluctuate on different delivery channels.
Pickup Manager: Deliverect’s Pickup Manager permits drivers and restaurants to view the status of their order with the pickup screen, making overall communications smoother.
- Restaurant staff can easily manage order statuses to keep drivers and restaurants well informed.
- A look at the pickup screen will tell drivers when to go to the counter to pick up their order, improving user experience and shortening wait times.
- Through real-time and clear order status updates, orders that are ready are brought to customers faster and more accurately.
- Dispatch: Dispatch enables restaurants to manage the complete delivery experience through their direct channels, helping them to increase customer satisfaction.
- Restaurants can easily offer delivery on their direct channel by assigning online orders to delivery drivers.
- They can also follow orders through the entire delivery, as real-time driver updates and driver details are shared.
Chat: Chat provides conversational support, allowing our customers to reach us directly from our platform tools anytime and anywhere.
In the food service industry, everything restaurants do is for the benefit of diners. They cook delicious food to delight their palates, they offer a variety of dining options to match their needs and preferences, and they craft balanced menus to cater to every kind of eater. Everything is to ensure that the end customer has an excellent experience and returns to dine time and time again.
Incorporating online ordering software to improve delivery capabilities will positively impact diners’ experience, especially how restaurants communicate with their customers. Maintaining stellar customer communication is vital to creating brand loyalty, as it shows them their experience and opinions are important.