September 2016 - inresto

How to Increase Restaurant Sales with Combos Offers

Posted on 28/09/201616/09/2021 by inresto

Covid-19 has caused a huge blow to restaurants and they are battling with a sharp decline in footfalls. Restaurants all over the world are trying out several techniques for boosting sales. The most effective method for increasing sales at your restaurant would be to introduce attractive combo offers.
As per POS Sector, 53% of customers in the fast-food restaurants considered combo meals “very attractive”. To add on, 77% of guests at full-service restaurants find combo meals “extremely attractive”.

Methods for creating attractive combo offers

Let’s explore the various options to design combo meals that entice your diners.

Club the slow-moving and fast-moving items

Slow-moving dishes in your menu causes a major dent to your profits. It leads to wastage of raw materials and labour. The best way to tackle this problem is by launching a combo offer with a slow-moving and fast-moving item. Now you would think how to identify the high-performing and low-performing dishes. It’s quite easy now with the help of modern day, cloud based restaurant management systems such as inresto POS that offers you with valuable insights.

An example of the information provided by the platform is that Schezwan fried rice is a favourite among diners and was ordered by 250 customers in a day. On the other hand, caramel custard was the least preferred and chosen by only 10 diners. Include both these dishes as part of the same combo meal so that the slow-moving caramel custard also gets sold out quickly.

Pricing to make all the difference

Assume a scenario where you have priced both pizza and dessert each at 200 bucks. Come up with a combo offer where you sell half a pizza with a small portion of dessert for Rs.220. It will actually cost you only 200 bucks and you stand to gain 20 bucks profit. Thus come up with different combo meals at attractive price points.

Include drinks in your combo meals

Most the customers at quick service restaurants prefer to order a drink after the main course. Include favourite drinks preferred by many as part of the combo meal.

Change your combo according to seasons

Assume that you are offering a veg burger and cold coffee as part of a combo meal. It’s of no doubt that the combo work out well in the summer season. During the rainy season, replace the cold coffee with hot coffee. Thus, it’s an imperative to make changes to your combo as per the variation in seasons.

Launch limited period offers

To entice customers during Christmas season, you can come up with a combo offer of Pasta and chocolate cake. Mention clearly in the menu that it’s a limited period offer that ends in December. The time limit will definitely lure customers to make repeated visits at your restaurant.

Train your staff to promote combo offers

The waiters should be knowledgeable about the various combo meals on offer. Assume that the customer is ordering a Chicken biryani for 100 bucks. The waiter can suggest that it’s more beneficial to order a combo meal of Chicken biryani and chocolate ice cream that will cost him 125 bucks. With the smart information provided by restaurant management platform, waiters can cross sell the favourite dishes of their choice.

Categorise your combo offers

Come up with separate combo offers for various times of the day. An example would be a set of breakfast combos, lunch combos and dinner combos. Such categorisation makes it easy for the customers to choose from. The introduction of new combos can be highlighted in the menu so that it grabs the attention of diners. Waiters can also brief the customers about the new launches.

Parting Words

Restaurateurs can no longer survive with the conventional marketing techniques. Competition is heating up and profits have become wafer-thin. To make matters worse, customers have cut down on their restaurant visits. In this scenario, the best strategy would be to come up with lucrative combo offers. A price conscious customer would definitely weigh in the benefits of combo offers and choose them over ordering separately. The techniques discussed above will help you immensely in launching combo offers that are hard to resist.

Food Ordering Website- Benefits of having one for your restaurant!

Posted on 23/09/201616/09/2021 by inresto

Restaurateurs all over the world are grappling with the challenges posed by Covid-19. There is a sharp decline in the footfalls at restaurants and profits have become wafer thin. To make matters worse, third party food delivery platforms are charging an exorbitant commission for delivery that has affected their profits badly. As per the report by Washington Post, profit margins for full-service restaurants are typically around 3 to 5 percent, and delivery app fees tend to hover around 30%.

Hence, the need of the hour is to launch a food ordering website for your restaurant. Instead of relying on third party delivery chains, your customers can place order for food directly from your restaurant’s website.

Key benefits of having your restaurant’s food ordering website

Let’s delve deep into the benefits of developing a food ordering website for your restaurant.

Cash in on the boom in online ordering – In the post-Covid world, people have become more hygiene conscious. Many of them are scared of the contraction and prefer to order online rather than visiting restaurants.

There is a huge number of millennials ordering food online. As per the report by Fortune India, millennials accounted for about 63% of the overall base of the online food delivery market in India. The reason they prefer to order online is that it’s quite easy and saves time and energy of cooking at home. By starting your own food ordering website, you can take advantage of the boom in millennials ordering food online.

Serving as a point of contact

Nowadays it is quite natural for food lovers to search in Google before trying out food from a new restaurant. From your website, customers will get to know several details such as location, contacts, timings, specialities, ratings, reviews etc. Also include the legacy of your restaurant, name and location of the sister concerns etc. By posting SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) friendly content and blogs, your website will appear in the top of Google search results.

Since reviews matter a lot, request celebrities and eminent personalities who have visited your restaurant for feedback. It no doubt leads to more traffic at your restaurant.

How Customer Connect App Can Improve Delivery Operations at Your Restaurant

Posted on 12/09/2016 by inresto

A restaurant software is expected to integrate the front as well as back end for smooth functioning of the outlet. The former usually includes streamlining the billing process, theft control, order taking, dynamic menu changes, tax settings, gathering customer data and mapping it with their preferences, email and SMS notifications, etc. However, what if the front end software could be integrated with a CRM module to bring in greater efficiencies in terms of customer service?

torqus customer connect app calling screen

The Customer Connect App which is part of an end to end restaurant management solution by Torqus, is perhaps one of the best innovations for the hoteliers. By connecting automatically with the POS software, this app helps trace the caller and flashes important details about them even before the phone is answered.

Therefore, when a customer calls, the attendee is equipped with significant information such as their name, number, address, order history, average value of orders, etc., enough to make the caller feel valued by your staff. By being integrated with the CRM module, the Customer Connect App has also revolutionised loyalty programs by restaurants.

torqus customer connect app customer sort options

With the data collected, the app also makes it possible to cross and up sell, gauge how open and receptive the customers must be for promotional offers, social media contests, and other infrequently used marketing strategies in the F&B industry. Thus, in addition to tapping on customers who place orders at the restaurant by being physically present or online, this app includes, under its purview, telephonic orders too.

Understanding customers, their needs, and purchase behaviour is perhaps the determining factor of success for any business in any industry. The Customer Connect App helps in creating long-term relationships with customers and arming the business owners with enough data and tools to sustain and grow this relationship.

How Restaurant Owners can Stay Ahead in the Game with Accurate Reporting

Posted on 08/09/2016 by inresto

To make a business more lucrative, one needs to keep experimenting with various new strategies while simultaneously focusing on the business model as usual. Whether a particular strategy is effective for your business or whether it achieved the goals it was expected to, can be determined by generating reports and drawing comparisons while keeping an eye on the P&L sheet.

restaurant management reports & analytics

A restaurant management software can be a life saver for those business owners still using traditional ways of making calculations. By generating accurate reports of daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly happenings at the restaurant, evaluation of multiple things like service, staff productivity, offerings, promotions, location, etc. becomes convenient. Since it is backed by real data, the fear of risk taking is drastically reduced.

The restaurant reports generated (for e.g. daily sales report or item category sales report) give insights to the owner(s) such as which dish is ordered most and therefore the price for which can be increased, which dish is not ordered at all and must be eliminated from the menu, which outlet is performing brilliantly and which needs some push, the amount of wastage, the number of days the stock lasts for, service delivery time, effect of promotions, online and offline, etc. Reporting also helps in gauging whether investment in maintaining the restaurant’s website or reputation on social media makes business sense.

Our restaurant management solution understands the importance of reporting for business owners. It helps in generating reports for a single outlet as well as multiple outlets in real-time. Also, with everything being mobile and stored on cloud, reports can be accessed on the fly without much ado.

Therefore, a technologically advanced software combined with a smart device can help restaurant business owners keep a tab on the performance of the establishment from anywhere in the world, all in real-time.

How to Increase Your Restaurant’s Business with Integrated CRM

Posted on 05/09/201617/09/2021 by inresto

Understanding customers’ needs and purchasing behaviour is perhaps the biggest driver of success for any business. With respect to the F&B industry, customer data plays a major role in deciding the menu, what specials to keep, which dishes to discontinue, what promotions to offer, etc.

Torqus - Don't be like Jon Snow - Be a Smart Restaurateur — Don’t be like Jon Snow – Be a Smart Restaurateur

CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT

A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system collects, stores, manages, and makes sense of all customer related information. Very often, restaurants don’t make the most of all the customer information available to them and end up missing out on improving their service and margins. The best way to capitalise on a restaurant’s CRM system is by integrating it with an existing restaurant management system or to purchase a holistic system which provides this module to the owners to capitalise on customer satisfaction, relationship & retention.

There may be separate data collecting systems running simultaneously such as a POS software, loyalty programs, online ordering portal etc. A CRM system equipped with an end-to-end restaurant management system compiles all fragmented data and brings it on one dashboard, therefore, helping to make sense of the entire database of the restaurant and providing valuable insights.
Not only the contact information of the customers is stored, but also their order history, in-house purchases, previous wait staff that serviced them, order preferences, and so on. This integrated CRM can profile customers and segregate the highest spenders, customising service for each and every guest.

It further helps restaurateurs make strategic use of data by rewarding loyal customers, creating customised marketing and promotional campaigns, making redemption of offers and coupons easier, etc.

POS integrated with CRM can also prove to be excellent in terms of providing personalised service to customers no matter which outlet of your restaurant chain they visit. Therefore, it helps in creating long-term relationships with customers and is the smartest decision for restaurant business owners.