Chelsea Allenby is a Digital Marketer of 9 years and Managing Director of Allenby Digital Ltd, an online marketing agency she set-up in 2015, specialising in social media and content marketing. www.chelseamarketing.co.uk
Choosing the right customer delivery system for your restaurant is one of the most important decisions you will make. It has the power to completely change your approach to customer service. Streamlined systems improve efficiency, by increasing average delivery speed. As a restaurant owner, you want the most cost-effective solution that truly delivers on its promises. With so many solutions, how do you make the right decision? This article will look at three different categories of delivery management to provide you with some further insight.
Delivery Management Solutions That Work With Your Existing Delivery System
If you already have the resources in place to deliver orders using your own team of employees, this is one of the best solutions. Delivery management platforms such as Orderlord are designed to be easily integrated into your existing business model.
Orderlord promises to do three things:
- Increase customer retention by minimising late deliveries
- Boost loyalty & repeat orders
- Improve efficiency & reduce costs
Their advanced system streamlines customer delivery, allowing you to provide quicker services, fulfilling more orders and keeping customers happy. Unlike third party delivery management, a solution such as Orderlord charges you a flat monthly fee rather than a commission on every order.
The driver’s app is simple to use, so you’ll have no problem training your delivery staff in just a few minutes. Orderlord provides an hour of training directly to you, the owner; enabling you to pass on this knowledge to your team. Orderlord links directly with Google maps and provides drivers with pre-populated templates which they can quickly send to customers. For example, if they are stuck in traffic and running behind schedule.
One of the main problems with managing your own delivery team is tracking and refining efficiency. Busy restaurants often struggle with unreliable deliverers and systems that fail to reduce wastage and cut down waiting times. Orderlord allows you to track the efficiency of the entire process, allowing you to make the necessary improvements.
“We’ve been using Orderlord now for 6 months. I wanted a more comprehensive solution that would allow us to track and analyse average delivery speed. Overall the solution itself is flawless and our customers can track their order too, which we weren’t able to offer before. The feedback we have passed on to Orderlord is that we’d like to see an improvement in the translation of languages and a touch responsive map. We would certainly recommend Orderlord if you’re looking to take your delivery service to the next level.” – Papa Dels
Third Party Delivery Management
If you don’t have staff on the ground to physically deliver your orders then you might want to consider third party delivery management. Running your own in-house service requires a lot of initial outlay other than just paying staff; you also have vehicles, maintenance, fuel, packaging, insurance and marketing of your delivery services. That’s where third-party companies can be a good option, for restaurants who don’t want these hassles. Deliveroo is one of the most well-known services available, using a vast network of drivers, it can offer you an instant new revenue channel.
Pricing means you will pay a commission on every order delivered, so while you’ll save money and time providing your own service, scaling up might not be as cost effective. Another consideration with third party services is that they might not cover your local area, limiting you to other options.
POS Integrated Delivery Systems
The third option is to choose an EPOS solution that has an integrated high-quality delivery system. Having everything rolled into one can simplify the process. Rameses by Andromeda provides an EPOS that excels at delivery helping you to optimise your drivers wherever they are. The main benefit is that you do not need any integration and everything is included in one solution. You don’t need to retype orders manually into your delivery management solution: all orders are collected from all sources into your system.
On the other hand, POS delivery modules are missing many important features. Since delivery management is not their main focus, the delivery part is missing many important and useful details. Also, if you choose to have a POS integrated delivery system, you are limited to the location and you can’t manage all branches from one place. If you want to improve your delivery business, you can also miss a powerful analytics, which can give you a great insight and can show you your bottlenecks in delivery management.
Looking to take your business online? You should be! The ease of ordering online will open the doors to many more customers. So when you make the move to taking orders online, you need something that fits with your branding and integrates with other areas of your business too.
Livepepper is an open online ordering solution that can be easily integrated with your POS or delivery management system. It’s open to developers and applications via API allowing you to customise your own tools. You have the ability to manage your website independently and collect customer data for future marketing.
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