Metrics that Matter: Assessing Online Ordering Success with KPIs

The explosion of online ordering systems has propelled restaurant businesses to accelerate their order management mechanisms. Order management is integral to your business’s success and crucial in building long-term customer relationships. Whether you can meet customer expectations and respond promptly to market demand is an essential process that impacts customer satisfaction.

Understanding Order Management KPIs

Before delving into order management KPIs( Key Performance Indicators), let’s first understand their relevance to the restaurant business.

A restaurant’s KPI can be regarded as a performance metric that can be used as a yardstick to measure its success. Collectively, these can provide significant insights into the restaurant's overall performance.

After all, your investments in marketing your business or promoting sales can be in vain, especially if you have dissatisfied customers who may not want to return to your restaurant to order. Hence, it is important to check your order management KPIs. This will offer insight into maximizing distinct elements of the online order management process.

While there could be a range of KPIs, here are some commonly used to measure business success. These include:

• Sales
• Profitability
• Employee productivity
• Customer satisfaction

As online ordering has become one of the focal points of most restaurant businesses, let’s understand what order management KPIs refer to.

Restaurants can improve their order management by monitoring and responding to KPIs. These important metrics are often monitored with the help of an order management system. KPIs should be premised on crisp, clear, and objective metrics. Understanding these can improve your order management processes.

This blog can help you identify the appropriate KPIs, monitor and measure the relevant metrics, and understand how they can impact your business. That way, you can take the necessary actions to improve the overall health of your restaurant’s online ordering business.

Reasons Why KPIs Play an Integral Role in Restaurant Business

Enable Performance Measurement

If you are scouting for quantifiable metrics to better assess the performance levels of multiple operational aspects, performance KPIs can be worthy. From tracking sales, customer satisfaction, profitability, and employee productivity, you can identify pockets of strengths and weaknesses in your online ordering business.

Facilitate Goal Setting

KPIs can help establish objective goals and benchmarks for your restaurant’s performance. If your targets are premised on KPIs, it will become easier for your business to monitor processes over time. With this, you can realign strategies to achieve desired results.

Improve Financial Management

Be it revenue, operational costs, or profitability, all these components are important for the effective financial management of your online ordering shop. Keeping track of financial KPIs can aid in managing your restaurant’s finances better. For instance, it can enable the optimization of pricing strategies, help control expenses, and optimize profitability. Such financial management metrics could include the workforce and food costs and gross profit margin.

Affirm Operational Experience

Key performance indicators (KPIs) can help evaluate the efficacy of your restaurant’s online ordering business. KPIs such as the table turnover rate, wait times, and order accuracy can help identify gaps in service quality. As the quality of your service drives customers, it is an important factor in determining the success of your business. These metrics can help improve it, thereby enhancing overall productivity.

In addition to the above, KPIs can also enable your business to compare its performance with competitors in the industry, helping you stay competitive in the market.

A Few KPIs that You Could Consider

Sales KPIs

Sales KPIs are indispensable as they are essential to your restaurant’s business. Key performance indicators may include your restaurant’s monthly or annual revenue, new and returning customer count, etc. You can track these metrics to understand how your business is performing and make changes to boost sales accordingly. For instance, the purchasing frequency of your customer can tell how much repeat business it recorded during a given period. Your business may offer exclusive loyalty benefits to customers who frequently buy from your restaurant.

Profitability Indicators

Profitability KPIs such as net profit margin, net profit, and operating margins can give you a fair idea of how profitable your business is. They can also aid in making necessary changes to boost profitability.

For instance, the average order value can be calculated by dividing the number of orders by the revenue your business generated from any average order over a set time frame. This can help you know customer behavior trends and can come in handy for planning pricing, sales, and marketing strategies. After all,  a boost in the average order value is directly proportionate to your restaurant’s profitability.

Indicators of Customer Satisfaction

Gauging customer satisfaction levels can help you bridge gaps and improve customer fulfillment. As an important metric, customer satisfaction KPIs could include the rate of repeat business, customer complaints, rate of returns, and other customer management surveys. For instance, the rate of orders returned. A return for your business can be considered a refund and indicate unhappy customers.

If your restaurant has a high return rate, it could be attributed to factors such as bad quality food, orders not delivered on time, etc. The rate of return can be determined by calculating the percentage of orders returned against the total order.

KPIs to Determine Employee Productivity

Employee productivity is a vital metric that needs to be tracked for your restaurant business. These metrics can clarify how productive your restaurant employees are so that you can make necessary changes in their engagement to improve productivity. Such metrics could include employee turnover, absenteeism, and employee productivity.

For instance, the employee turnover rate can depict their satisfaction or dissatisfaction levels. Employee turnover rate is the percentage of employees who exit the restaurant services within a given period. So, if the turnover rates are high, it could indicate concerns about employee satisfaction and retention.

Other KPIs determining employee productivity could comprise metrics such as the workforce cost percentage and rate of training completion, among others. Such factors enable identifying staffing requirements, focusing on employee engagement, and helping address varied performance issues.

Monitoring Online Ordering KPI’s with OrderEm

KPIs are essential tools for measuring, tracking, and improving performance in the online ordering industry. Your restaurant can track and analyze relevant metrics to make data-driven decisions to help it succeed. Here’s how OrderEm can facilitate this process.

OrderEm offers a comprehensive solution to help you manage and prioritize orders in real time. From receiving orders to ensuring final delivery and tracking after-sales experience, OrderEm can enable expert online order management. It facilitates inventory matching to orders and helps track relevant KPIs, displaying real-time data via user-friendly dashboards.

Despite the value or utility of your product, your customers can have issues with your brand, especially if there are loopholes in the online order management process. With relevant order management metrics, you can reimagine order and delivery management as assets for your business. Issues such as shipping delays, order return rates, incorrect order delivery, etc., can be handled well, satisfying customers and ensuring efficient management.