With all Canadian merchants, especially restaurant owners, trying to adapt to the new reality of Covid 19, a big concern is trying to figure out what can they change in their business operations, without throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Restaurant owners and managers need to evaluate and institute new policies and procedures that will help their businesses survive, and if they make good decisions, even flourish during these difficult times. Few business sectors have been as hard hit as restaurants. Nearly all restaurants, regardless of size, have been forced to close, during the Covid crisis. If temporary closures didn’t kill them permanently, now they are re-opening to the public, but with severe restrictions on capacity and with new standards of sanitization in play. Now a restaurant’s survival probably depends on the ability and efficiency of serving take-out. The ability to sell their food, without using up dining capacity.
Restaurants are leveraging the assets of their kitchens and cooks, to expand their customer base. For an enhanced customer experience, that also usually means having delivery available. There are a few choices on how to achieve this. The most obvious and the most common, is to have customers phone in and order from whoever picks up the phone! Some restaurants, like those serving Chinese Food or Pizza, are take out only. They have been doing business like this for decades. Some have now advanced to having an online presence, where they can display their menus, so customers can phone in to order choices, and already knowing what the cost will be. Obviously the option of take-out food applies to dine-in restaurants as well. If they aren’t already offering customers the option of take-out, they’re doomed, but we would be amiss if we didn’t talk about the whole idea of take-out dining being reinvented!
Now specialized delivery service companies can handle the take-out side of a restaurants operations – even to the point of displaying menus for the restaurants on the delivery service website. The premise for this is the old “choice close” reinvented. If you’re on one of these sites (Door Dash, Uber Eats, Skip the Dishes, to name a few), the question isn’t, ”Are you ordering food?” it’s “Which option do you want?” While that is a great way to increase sales for the restaurant, it may not be good for the bottom line. These delivery services can charge the restaurant up to 30% of the menu prices as well as a delivery charge to the customer. Taking 30% off, can the restaurant still make money? Very questionable. But I now want to suggest a better way! A way that doesn’t cost a merchant 30% of his sales. A way that takes the investment of the expense of its’ website, and turns that expense into a revenue stream for the operation. A way that takes away all the time needed on the phone to take pick-up orders; also takes away all the time taking credit card payments for those orders!
The answer, Mr. or Ms. Merchant, is to make your website sell for you! Put your menu online, have customers make their choices, have those choices go directly to the kitchen so the cooks can immediately start preparing the food, and take the payments online in a customer self-serve process. This process doesn’t tie up your front-end staff at their busiest times, doesn’t take time getting the kit89+44512chen clear, specific orders, and, best of all, doesn’t cost 30% for a service that the restaurant can easily do itself. Talk to your KIS Payments local Payment Advisor, or go to our website to see which of our three apps, Koomi, Hippos, or Ecwid, can work for you. Combined with our state-of-the-art Clover terminals, both for POS and payments, we’ve got every area of your restaurant operations covered! www.kispayments.com
