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5 Restaurant Technology You Need to Know.

Retail POS Solution /

The time is evolving, and so are the expectations of customers with the restaurants. Times are gone when customers are liable to commute to the restaurant in order to get their favorite meals. They want to eat wherever and however they want. In addition, with technological advancements, they expect faster services and complete attention from the staff at the same time.   Research has shown during the pandemic that the food home delivery ratio increased to a certain level, and this was the factor through which restaurants could manage to survive. Usage of third-party food delivery applications like Swiggy, Zomato, and so on grew significantly. Technology played a vital role in restaurant survival.   Now, the customer can enjoy food wherever and however they want. They can now make changes to their order without having to ask a staff member. For instance, they can tell them to add more cheese to the pizza or ask for extra ketchup right there and then without a server. In some reports, we discovered that people would pay more to add Ons when they have a self-service facility available.   As technology has evolved so much, there is still room for growth. To meet customer preferences and not to mention to evolve, restaurants need to invest more in further technological advancements. This way, they can focus more on what they love: creating delicious meals and delicacies and unforgettable experiences. We have compiled a list of restaurant technologies that restaurants must be aware of.   Online POS  An Online POS system or a Cloud-based POS system is more than billing software. It is more advanced and delivers more features than the traditional one. Older POS were merely used to collect bills online and offline separately. However, the scenarios have changed, and modern POS can collect bills, take orders, track inventory, and integrate the front office with the back. Everything is saved on the cloud so there is no risk of data loss. Even if there is no internet, the transactions are recorded offline and saved on the cloud as soon as they are connected to the net.   Apart from this, a cloud-based POS records customer transactions from different channels which can later be utilized to create deals and plans for the customers. According to some reports, about 61% of businesses want their next POS to be cloud-based. Some of the reasons include its cost-effectiveness and scalability. Online POS can be availed of a monthly subscription. Therefore, ditching the need to invest in high upfront costs. It does not even need hardware and is quick to deploy.   Artificial Intelligence (AI)  Artificial intelligence is the simulation of human processes by machines, specifically computer systems. This technology can process even the natural language, collect data, and make sense from a vast amount of data. In the case of restaurants, there are many applications powered by AI such as:   Chatbots: chatbots are designed to understand speech patterns and have relevant conversations through which customers can book a table or order food online. Platforms like- official websites and social media platforms can be used.   Predictive Ordering: this feature analyses your restaurant’s previous orders and revenue and forecasts future needs while helping you avoid over-stocking or under-stocking.   Staff Scheduling: scheduling and staffing solutions help you schedule staff optimally.   AI is the heart of businesses which helps them grow and evolve exponentially. Therefore, allowing restaurants to elevate their service standards.   Kitchen Display System (KDI)   A Kitchen Display System (KDI) is designed to replace your traditional paper ticket and kitchen printers. The job is not done here, there are a lot more things it offers. As soon as a customer place an order, it flashes straight on the accurate kitchen counter. If guests want to make changes or wish to have add Ons they may address them straight away while notifying the chef.   There is a function called recipe viewer, which enables chefs to follow a specific recipe and avoid wastage. A recipe viewer will also cut costs on training and call attention to nutrition and allergy information.   Business Intelligence (BI)  Business Intelligence optimized AI to compile, integrate and analyze business data, turning it into a single vision truth while driving more logical decisions. Business Intelligence and analytics solutions have been used to increase business efficiency, and their effectiveness is not new to restaurants.   With this technology, restaurants can place suitable lunch meals in the relevant areas or provide reports on the breakfast items making the most profit each week. Restaurant owners can also identify if the crowd in a location would like to see stand-up comedy during dinner. Having these kinds of data at hand helps make more logical decisions and    Contactless Payments and Self Ordering Devices  Restaurants need forms of payments that require little or no contact with shared surfaces. For instance, mobile wallets, biometric authentication payments, credit cards, debit cards. Contactless payments are much safer, especially in this era where social distancing has become one of the necessities.   Similarly, self-ordering devices vitally helped cope with the pandemic. They enable customers to make their orders without a server in the restaurant kitchen. Customers can either use self-serving kiosks, tablets on the table side, or even their mobile phones.   Internet of Things (IoT)  Internet of things refers to all the items and devices that are designed to connect to the internet and each other to transmit data. For instance, connected kitchen appliances like ovens, freezers, and deep fryers upload their status automatically to the cloud ensuring seamless operational flow and regulatory compliance.   With IoT, managers do not have to go through each device and check their condition. Instead, they can simply go through the reports and see the presence of an issue and think of a resolution.    As time flies, the restaurant industry is rapidly changing. It needs to adopt technological advancements to fulfill customer demands and embrace better efficiency. LS Retail provides a suite of tools that ensure customer satisfaction as well as better business efficiency. Trident Information Systems is a Gold LS Retail Partner who has served multiple business ventures. Backed with a team of 150+ experts and two decades of experience, we deliver excellent software services. Contact us for further information.  

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Drive Customers Back to Your Business in a Post-COVID Era

Retail ERP Software /

There has been a massive shift in the way customers approach brands. They have now become even more quality and cost-conscious. Businesses have also modified the way they operate; they have now understood their customer’s sentiments better while the world is fighting a battle against this never-ending virus.   In order to gain your customer’s trust, you have to be true to your brand and serve its purpose. Now how can you do it better? By understanding your customers, their needs, and sentiments. Keep your customers first. Ask for feedback, use appropriate technology to track their spending patterns and habits. What changed, and how can you keep up with it? It is all you need to understand. Given below are a few things that COVID-19 changed;   Brand Switching: As several brands dwindled and shuttered, consumers were forced to try new brands. With the limited opportunity to purchase products in person, they had to rely more on online mediums. As the pandemic started fading, more people began to realize that it was not a bad idea to give other brands a chance.   Expecting channels: As customers explored online shopping increasingly, they became further accustomed to Omnichannel research and transactions. Customers are now expecting physical stores to offer online transactions that complement their overall shopping experience even before entering the store.   Price and Value Consciousness: After job declines and shortage of income, people started becoming even more quality conscious and began to question further if their brand is equating the value or not. Also, they are concerned about environmental sustainability and what these brands are doing in the favor of the planet.   Loyalty V/s Retention: Many people confuse loyalty with retention. However, little do they acknowledge their difference. Customer loyalty is what fuels customer retention. Loyalty is a keen sense of support and obligation to choose a brand which later fuels retention.    Tips to Keep Customers Loyal to Your Band Post-COVID  There are a number of ways through which you can retain customers. If accompanied by suitable technology like LS Retail, even better. You have to make sure the quality of your product is up to the mark while keeping customers first at all times.   Keep Online Communication Consistent  Online communications involve updated social media posts and emails. However, at the onset of COVID, various small businesses paused their online communication. If you are one of them as well, this is the best time to begin again.   You do not have to aggressively promote your brand (which can later become annoying for the customer) and understand that the situation is now different from pre-COVID times. All you have to do is inform your customers about product availability. Since this is a tough time for everyone, sympathize with them, tell your stories, and let them know how much you care for them. This is the best time to connect emotionally with the consumer.   Omnichannel Customer Service  Imagine how frustrating it would be for a customer to fill in their name, contact, and other details again and again at every step, especially when his requirement is urgent.  For instance, a customer purchased a product last weekend from your store, who raised a fund request explaining his issues. After a while, a customer executive calls him asking for issues further, and other details again. After a few days, now the marketing manager wants to have a word with the buyer and asks for the same details again.   Businesses need to introduce a robust omnichannel mechanism that allows every member to stay on the same page while taking care of the customer’s concerns. It not only saves time but also lets the customer feel important.   To set up an effective omnichannel, you need to bring sales, marketing, and customer services together and connect them with all touchpoints via a common dashboard.   Offer Gift cards to Customers  Pandemic or not- everyone loves gifts. To increase customer engagement, offer them e-gift cards. This way, you are maintaining communication while avoiding human contact. Offer them interesting offers while keeping your business in mind and how it runs. For example, if you have a store at Amazon, you can offer X% cashback on your next purchase. Such offers thrill customers and boost sales while maintaining safety.   Resolve Queries of Unsatisfied Customers first  It is more important to train your customer service team to treat unsatisfied customers first than you think. It is a massive risk to let them remain dissatisfied. Everyone has access to social media platforms where they can freely share their opinions. There is always a risk of negative promotion if they are discontented. The best practice is to resolve their queries as soon as possible. Another factor that may come into influence is their negative remarks on social media impacting your website search engine.   Reward Loyal Customers   Using a unified software solution like LS Retail can help you identify your loyal customers. With a robust visionary dashboard, you can calculate each customer’s behavior and pick the loyal ones. Offer attractive deals and offers exclusively tailored for them. It makes the consumer feel important and belonged. You can classify different customers and segment them into diverse groups and prepare exclusive deals for each. Offer gifts that none of your competitors offer. There is no better time than their birthdays, anniversaries, festivals, and other notable events to offer your personalized gifts.   It is essential to think out-of-the-box to keep ahead of your competition in the post-COVID era. Letting the right technology assist you is a clever idea. LS Retail is a unified software solution specifically designed to take care of your every business need. Trident Information Systems is a Gold Partner of LS Retail. Armed with 150+ technical resources, we have served various business ventures. Contact us for further information.  

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How do Successful Loyalty Programs Help in Increasing Sales and Drives Customer Behavior?

Retail POS Solution /

Did you know if you manage to boost your customer engagement rate by as low as 5%, your profit can increase up to 60%? Loyalty programs are a great measure to increase customer engagement from both existing and new customers.   Loyalty programs deliver tremendous benefits to a business, they make the customers feel being cared for, recognized, and valued. Why wouldn’t anyone want to come back to you if you make them feel special? Apart from financial, these programs proffer non-financial benefits as well.   Note that not just any loyalty programs will provide the same benefits, you need to carefully hold research, track customer behavior, understand their spending pattern, and generate customer driving strategies. A unified ERP software like LS Retail can help create loyalty programs like a piece of cake. Essential data is automatically generated in the form of dashboards, providing a single vision of truth. Therefore, driving customer behavior and boosting sales.   Why is Customer Loyalty so Important?  Research has shown that 80% of your business comes from your loyal 20% of customers. An effective loyalty program can ensure repeat business from 47% of your customers. Amazing eye-catching deals can drive a good sum of customers back to your business.   Most people believe that brands should offer loyalty programs while 60% of internet users address ‘earning rewards’ as one of the most valued aspects of a retail shopping experience. It is best to use software that helps create loyalty programs like LS Retail, where customers can earn loyalty points and redeem them in your retail store and its respective chains. You can create different schemes and set rules on how to collect and spend points.  Apart from this it can help segment different customers based on their spending patterns, choices, and habits. It also keeps track of the vouchers and offers that are redeemed or on stand-by.   How Effective Loyalty Programs Help Boosting Customer Sales?  An effective loyalty program can do wonders for your business, boost sales and connect with the customers emotionally. Nothing is more effective than a loyalty program based on a customer’s desires, spending pattern, behavior, and similar factors. Research has shown that people’s emotions drive them to purchase more than their needs. Given below are its amazing benefits:   Greater ROI   It is costlier to acquire new customers than to retain the existing ones. Paying for different forms of promotions can add up to the marketing costs significantly. Additionally, 50% of your existing customers are more likely to spend more on your new product. Hence, providing a higher ROI.   Stay Ahead of the Competition  Shoppers tend to go through a hundred brands before buying a product in a few clicks keeping the product in mind more than the store. It might drive a few businesses like yours to the bottom, putting larger stores like Amazon at the top.   Loyalty programs can change your game while not relying on the pricing alone. Since buyers tend to spend more based on their emotions than their requirements, a loyalty program understands the customer and creates perfect schemes for them. It makes them feel special and connects them on an emotional level.   Understand your Customers   A loyalty program helps you understand your customers better, their preferences, and predict their behavior. With a loyalty program feature, you can effortlessly identify trends, micro-segments and anticipate demands. Upgrade your marketing campaigns keeping customer habits in mind. Plan your stock, mix-match products, and boost cross-selling and upselling. All the channels a customer uses to access your business can store their data, process them, and turn them into insightful dashboards. Without proper customer insights, your business fails to create effective deals and offers.  New Customer Engagement   With a well-structured loyalty program, you can incentivize referrals, rewarding customers who bring new customers to your business. There is convincing evidence suggesting that referred customers are more profitable and loyal than non-referred customers ensuring more loyalty and low churn rates. 83% of customers show greater trust in personal referral than any other form of marketing. McKinsey’s study shows that referrals generate twice the sales of paid promotions.   Creates Brand Advocates  Loyalty programs not only encourage people to increase their engagement with your business but also promote it. According to some research, loyalty programs help boost referral promotion. People recommend a business to their friends and family members if they are happy with the loyalty schemes. Showing your customers how much you value them connects them emotionally and turns them into your brand advocates. Additionally, 86% of costumes engage with a brand by spreading the word.   Final Words   More customer engagement is the essence to boost sales. Ensure customer engagement with effective loyalty programs as it ensures a greater ROI, keeps you ahead in the competition, understands your customers, engages new customers, and creates brand advocates. ERP software services like LS Retail integrate all the channels and extract customer details which later help in making effective loyalty programs. Trident Information systems is a Gold Partner of LS Retail and has served various businesses so far. For further queries or a demonstration contact us.  

How do Successful Loyalty Programs Help in Increasing Sales and Drives Customer Behavior? Read More »