How to Choose the Right Technology Vendor for Restaurants
Technology & traction are like hands in gloves in the business landscape context. Businesses that fail to regard the right technology as the growth catalyst often end up falling early. Every industry, including restaurants, must keep digitization at the core of its growth strategy if it aims to remain pertinent, scalable, and progressive.
In this blog, we provide you an opportunity to understand:
- Why restaurants should focus on selecting the right technology
- How can they select the right technology vendor
Let’s dig in.
Technology for Restaurants- A Non-Negotiable Growth Aspect
57% of restaurant owners have declared that technology is crucial for their growth. Whether we talk about order management or customer management, technology redefines every aspect of restaurant operations. The right type of technology enables restaurants to:
Retain Their Customers
33% of US customers say they switch service providers, and 50% abandon a brand when they have a poor service experience. Technology can lower customer churn by offering omnichannel customer support, effective order management, personalized marketing, and even creating result-driven loyalty programs.
Enhance Their Financial Performance
The lack of the right technology adoption leads to a 10% revenue loss in the restaurant industry. Technology adoption has a high influence on a restaurant’s financial performance. Apt technology can track financial status in real-time and bring hidden operational inefficiencies to the surface.
Do Effective Staffing
Unfitting staffing and lack of talent bug 51% of restaurant owners. Technology adoption authorizes restaurant owners to automate many low-skill tasks, such as updating menus, taking orders, resolving tickets, and managing tables. This reduces the need to hire human resources.
Set up a Progressive Payment system
54% of millennial restaurants prefer using self-ordering kiosks with swift payment. You set up a self-operating kiosk and improve payment processing at every level using technology, resulting in a finer customer experience and a high repeat rate.
In a nutshell, a restaurant can reach new heights in every vital workflow by embracing advanced technology. The success of the technology adoption depends on the efficiency of your vendor.
A seasoned vendor can understand your immediate and future needs and profitably deploy fitting technology. If you're having trouble doing so, note the following tips.
Mastering the Art & Science of Selecting the Right Technology Vendor for a Restaurant
In today's restaurant scene, technology plays a huge role in success. Choosing the right tech partner isn't just picking any software - it can enormously affect your operations. Here are some key factors to contemplate when selecting the right technology vendor:
Evaluate Your Needs
Each restaurant's technology needs are different, so you first must gauge your requirements. Do you need inventory tracking software or a customer management tool? Which features would you like to see in your restaurant software? What’s your budget?
Try to figure out answers to all these questions before making any move. While you do so, make sure that you also prioritize your requirements. This is important to ensure that your biggest challenges are addressed first. For instance, if you need a POS for your restaurant, you should get a dedicated POS solution like OrderEm instead of customer management software.
Similarly, if lack of workforce is your main issue, you should adopt a solution to automate the maximum possible tasks. Moving ahead without knowing your needs can backfire you because:
- You will end up choosing software that will be expensive, lacks desired features, and is too complex to use
- An ill-fitting technology solution will not address your pain points and operational challenges the way you expect it to do
- You will reduce your ROI
- You might have scalability issues with a poor option
If you wish to have a renowned and feature-rich restaurant software like OrderEm that steers you towards success, work hard to understand your requirements.
Conduct Market Research
Once you know what you need, you should start the vendor hunting. Start searching for vendors offering technology solutions, specifically for restaurant industries. You must only shortlist the vendor offering a dedicated restaurant-industry-specific technology solution.
This is important to get exclusive features for the restaurant industry that generic solutions may fail to offer. You will get tailored features such as Table management, inventory management, recipe & menu management, and POS for order processing with restaurant-specific solutions.
In addition, you must pay attention to user reviews on Google and other trusted platforms about a technology partner. You can also ask for referrals from your peers and even attend conferences to connect with a reliable vendor personally.
Give Attention to Custom Tech
62% of organizations prefer custom tech over off-the-shelf software. But why? Generic tech solutions, lacking customization, will be a hindrance rather than a growth factor because they will fail to address your unique challenges and may have integration issues. Off-the-shelf solutions will have difficulties modifying according to your requirements, resulting in failed or inadequate adoption.
A vendor offering custom tech will redefine technology adoption for your restaurant. Customized tech solutions will have features exclusively built for you and streamline workflows immediately. In addition, custom restaurant solutions can be designed according to your restaurant's growth trajectory and easily accommodate your future needs.
To summarize, standard restaurant software offers a baseline solution. But custom tech can truly elevate your work efficiencies and deliver higher ROI.
So, it’s wise to partner with vendors like OrderEm that can customize restaurant solutions. Such vendors will listen to your distinctive requirements and deliver technology targeting them.
Unmatched Integration
Running a successful restaurant business is difficult and demands large-scale technology adoption. This is why 69% of restaurants use multiple technologies and want to integrate all of them. POS, accounting software, inventory management, customer management software, reporting and analytics software, and payroll software are some of the most common types of technologies that most restaurants use.
A disintegration in all these solutions will lead to improper insights into key workflows, data silos, and no real-time processing. Only a vendor offering a custom and wide range of integration can solve these challenges. Hence, you should choose a restaurant technology provider like OrderEM that offers many integrations and brings every fragmented technology under one platform.
Never Overlook Compliance
The restaurant industry has specific regulations regarding food safety, health codes, and user data. Therefore, a restaurant owner needs to ensure that every piece of technology used at work is compliant and adheres to data security.
Non-compliant technology can put your restaurant at risk. In addition, such technology deployment can also lead to hefty fines and license suspension. To avoid this hassle, we recommend you select a technology vendor that can develop solutions while keeping respective compliances in mind.
Having a compliant technology solution gives you great peace of mind and allows you to focus on running your restaurant without any worries.
Adequate Training & Support
No matter how effortless a technology solution seems, your staff needs hands-on training & support to use any technology solution. You must look for a vendor that offers comprehensive training and ongoing technical support for your staff.
A Right Technology Partner Means the Right Roadmap
Technology is crucial for a restaurant, and you will make dire mistakes if you’re not doing it the right way. Evaluate these factors to ensure you’ve only hired a dependable technology vendor like OrderEm that aligns well with your needs and offers reliable technology solutions.