In continuation to our special edition of Superstar, we bring to you more outstanding restaurants that overpowered the drop in the revenue curves during the pandemic with the help of inresto Online Order: the most robust online ordering platform.
What is ‘inresto Superstar’?
A monthly initiative to identify and recognize our partner restaurants’ phenomenal dining experience using inresto’s product suite. It is an effort to celebrate the unrelenting spirit of restaurants across the country! Restaurants spread laughter, moments of joy and create memories for a lifetime for millions of people. And to make that possible, it takes a dedicated staff and the right technology to streamline all the restaurant operations.
This month we are here to celebrate a few of such incredible restaurants that managed to do away with aggregator commissions using inresto online order, increased their profit margins, and delved into marketing solutions that have managed to raise efficiency and business for them.
What’s so special about it?
Restaurants across India have been suffering due to one lockdown after another, and business has been slow. Still, some restaurants managed to stay relevant among the diners and grow their business further with their off-the-spin business strategies.
Check out the Superstars of June 2021!
1. K’s Charcoal, Mumbai
This one-of-a-kind pizzeria continues to bring back home the forgotten art of cooking with their authentic Italian cuisine. This even continued with their delivery services when customers couldn’t visit them during the lockdown. The variety of authentic Italian food they have to offer is outstanding. Check out their menu here.
2. Kwality Restaurant, Kolkata – since 1952
Established in 1952, Kwality has become a name synonymous with Kolkata. Over the years, they have served North Indian food and have managed to keep the flavours and taste unchanged. During the lockdown when people couldn’t visit them, and even now, they have been bringing home this authenticity and nostalgia through their delivery services made possible with inresto Online Order.
Serving the best quality food and beverages at just the right prices, this restaurant combines its family recipes with style and personal flair to create a unique experience. See their menu here.
With the help of their own online ordering platform and digital marketing strategies, these restaurants managed to increase their incoming online orders by 4 times. Something that calls for big applause and celebration.
A big congratulations to all the superstars! We are happy to have helped you raise your revenue, increase productivity, and improve efficiency. We wish you continued success and happy diners all year long. 🙂
Keep reaching your restaurant business goals and continue to raise the bar for fellow restaurateurs with each passing year.
Customer feedback is the ultimate source to understand what your customers need and what are the improvement areas. Feedback will also help you to understand your strengths and weaknesses. Like many restaurants, you can also focus a lot on your feedback management data to generate new strategies and plans for the future.
Such curated plans and strategies help them to act in a focused way as well as helps to generate more and more revenue. In the next section, we are going to talk about the customer feedback collection tips.
Restaurants around the globe use different methods to collect customer feedback. Some of the methods which they follow include verbal communication, manually written feedback forms, taking advantage of social media, conducting online surveys, creating community boards and community groups, and using web analytics. We have discussed, in detail, below:
1. Verbal Communication
This is the simple and effective way to take feedback from your visiting customers. The serving staff can ask the customers after every meal or service whether they liked it or not, is there anything that can be improved or something that the customer disliked.
Such verbal communication is easy to follow and helps to build a healthy relationship with the customer, as asking in person gives an extra edge over other mediums. This method of taking customer feedback will help you to make necessary changes as well as improve your quality of services promptly.
2. Digital Feedback Forms
Feedback forms are a great tool as it not only helps you in getting feedback from your customers but also in advertising your restaurant. To suit the current situation, you can opt for the inresto’s online feedback module. This feature ensures that customers are provided with the following questions, via email or SMS:
What do you like the most about us?
What is the one thing that we should improve?
What is your favorite dish at our restaurant?
What is the dish you don’t like?
Do you like our staff’s behavior?
Collecting data from these questions will help you to improve on specific things. This is an amazing method and can be conducted at regular intervals of time. You are even able to customise the form to your liking, so that you are up-to-date about the customers’ dining experiences. After taking the feedback of the customers, it is important to analyze the data and act accordingly.
3. Social Media
Currently, the tide of Social media is rising everywhere. From big business houses to small shops, all stores are doing well with the help of different social media platforms. Social media will be considered as a game-changer in the world of marketing business. It has created new possibilities of gaining customers from all around the globe.
If you are also thinking about how to collect customer feedback for your restaurant, then social media is the best solution to your problem. This can be used effectively for the purpose of getting feedback on different types of products and services.
You can post your specific dishes or ask questions such as “do you like this/that dish of ours?”. The comment section of these posts and the like/dislike ratio will help you to understand what works and what doesn’t work for you. You can also reach out to your customers and send them personalized messages using the “Direct Message” option. Social Media is a great tool for knowing your customer, building trust, and receiving necessary feedback to act upon.
Online surveys are the best and most direct answer to the question: “how to collect customer feedback for your restaurant”. Creating online surveys is a great way to understand the market demand and to get an overall feedback on your products.
A survey generally has many questions ranging from basic questions about the operations, services, staff, to asking about the favorite dishes of your customers. You can post these surveys on your website and can also post them on your various social media handles. Such surveys can be even advertised on different websites or in the newspapers. They are a great tool to know the opinion of the masses and are advised to conduct on a periodic basis for better results.
5. Community Groups and Boards
Are you interested to know what are the latest hot topics in the market? What people are discussing about your products and services? Then, creating real-time community boards and groups can help you by providing live chats and discussions of people.
You can create specialized groups and boards for your customers where they meet each other and discuss various things. This will help you to understand what people like and what they dislike. Such real time feedback can also help you to add or remove a particular dish from your menu as well as aid in price management. Creating community groups and feedback forms is considered as the quickest method to take customers feedback.
6. Web Analytics
Web analytics is a bottom line when it comes to taking feedback. Regular analysis of your web data is very important for understanding your restaurant’s performance. Web analytics will help you to know what are the peak hours of traffic on your site, which dish people order the most, which age groups visit your site, what is the most commonly used method for payment by customers and much more.
This will help you to get a better picture of where and what to focus upon, whereby you can build a clear-cut strategy by understanding the feedback given from these web analytics.
Conclusion
Understanding what your customers require is the key to success of any business house. Hence, customer feedback plays a vital role in running a business. Just stick to what your customers want and what they don’t want, and try to deliver the same. This will help your business to grow exponentially in a short span of time and enhance the profits as well.
In this guide, we have shared some effective customer feedback collection tips to get feedback from your customers for those who are looking forward to a solution on “how to collect customer feedback for your restaurant”. We hope these methods help you to create a proper feedback system and grow your business.
Efficient management of kitchen operations is an integral part of any restaurant. Multiple activities happen in the kitchen simultaneously such as preparing dishes, using equipment and various ingredients, and serving and billing the customers. As there are several limitations, monitoring and managing the day-to-day activities in the kitchen using manual systems is the least recommended advice.
Hence, in this scenario, the best move that you could think of is the implementation of a restaurant Point of Sale system. It’s high time to explore the endless possibilities of using kitchen reports to run an efficient restaurant kitchen.
Using Kitchen Reports to Run an Efficient Restaurant
The major advantage of the leading restaurant management digital platforms such as inresto POS is that you can generate various reports to assess the performance of the restaurant kitchen. There are 5 techniques using which kitchen reports could prove highly beneficial for your restaurant operations.
6 Techniques of Using Kitchen Reports to Enhance Efficiency
If you have decided to implement the digital restaurant POS system, the next step is to understand the various features offered by these reports. Let’s go deep into the details of these reports and how you can make use of these features.
1. Employ Staff Members as per Requirement
One of the biggest challenges faced by any restaurant is to decide on the number of staff required at various times of the day. There are busy hours when you find it difficult to manage the rush of the customers with the limited number of staff. At the same time, there are lean times when the staff will be idle.
With inresto POS, it’s pretty easy to ascertain the volume of work handled during different times. Using the Kitchen Display System (KDS), you can easily figure out the number of tickets (Kitchen Order Ticket) fulfilled per hour in your kitchen. Based on these figures, you can decide on the ideal number of staff required across various shifts. This enhances the efficiency of your restaurant’s kitchen.
2. Ensure the Kitchen Keeps Up With the Demand
The main advantage of POS reports is that you can easily infer the average fulfilment time by hour of the day. It’s a metric that indicates the pace at which the orders are fulfilled. Even though you may have employed enough manpower across various shift timings, there are certain busy times when the kitchen is not able to match up to the huge number of orders.
So, go through the graph of average fulfillment time and check whether there is consistency in service across all shifts. If there’s a lag in average fulfillment time during any of the shifts, then it’s a clear indication that your kitchen is understaffed during that shift. To avoid the hungry customers waiting for their order, you can employ more staff during those busy times.
3. Get Insights on the Average Preparation Time
Always keep track of the average preparation time for each dish. This preparation helps you to prioritize the order in which the dishes are prepared in the kitchen.
Take the case of a customer who orders a plate of pizza and French fries. After waiting for a long time, the waiter serves the hot pizza on his table along with cold French fries. Obviously, you’ll have to deal with a disappointed customer due to bad timing and service. With insights on the average preparation time, you can direct the chef to prioritize the time and decide which dish to prepare first.
This is a typical example of how to use kitchen reports to run an efficient restaurant kitchen. Such small steps help to get rid of the unnecessary customer complaints which mar the reputation of your restaurant brand.
4. Inform the Customer about the Average Preparation Times
There are certain cases where the customer cannot afford to spend much time waiting to get the food served. Adding the average preparation time of the dishes in the menu can help to a great extent to resolve this issue.
Assume that a customer wants to order a plate of grilled chicken. He goes through the menu and finds that it will take 20 minutes to process the order. If he is in a hurry, he can order a chicken burger instead that takes only 10 minutes to serve. Hence, setting the right expectations for the customer helps to avoid unpleasant situations.
With the help of metrics such as average fulfillment time and average preparation time generated by POS systems, using kitchen reports to run an efficient restaurant is pretty easy now.
6. Identify the best managers
Using the detailed reports and insights offered by Inresto’s POS system, you can easily identify the top-performing managers. It will record the respective timings at which different shift managers log in. By taking a glance at the order fulfilment times, you will easily get to know the performance levels of different shift managers.
Managers with the fastest fulfilment times are the ones who are the most efficient in managing the kitchen. They definitely deserve an appreciation for their remarkable performance. It can be in the form of cash prizes or vouchers.
If the order fulfilment times are low in certain shift timings, it’s a clear sign that the performance is not up to the mark and there is scope for further improvement. So, provide the managers in charge of those shift timings refresher training. How to use kitchen reports to run an efficient restaurant kitchen purely depends on how you utilise the insights offered by POS systems.
Parting Words
Using manual efforts to increase the efficiency of your restaurant’s kitchen can help you only to a certain extent. In recent times, technology has led to a drastic change in the way restaurant kitchens are managed due to kitchen reports. Since it is not practical to keep an eye on all activities, making use of reports to the fullest would be the best approach to improve the efficiency of your restaurant kitchen.
The landscape of the F&B industry changed when food delivery aggregators disrupted the market a decade ago. The disruption has now become a by-product of the industry. The online food ordering & delivery market in Saudi Arabia is expected to grow at 10.05% CAGR during 2021-2026. Online aggregators like Talabat, Hunger Station, Careem, Jahez, among others, are facilitating the demand for delivery services at home in the Middle East market.
Like every coin has two sides, managing orders from multiple platforms can be a tedious task for your staff members. There are high chances of orders getting mixed up, losing data, and mismanagement in resource allocation. Even during the pandemic, the online food delivery market in the Middle East has shown consistent growth. With the new dynamics and surge in demand for online services, the volume of food deliveries will rise in the near future. The best way to overcome such hassles and manage all the orders seamlessly from one platform can be done through integration with a well-defined POS system.
inresto POS- A Fully Integrated Solution
inresto POS is a restaurant management software that helps manage billing, track order queues, customize offers, and assess reports on one platform. The cloud-based system allows a restaurant to operate on a remote server that can be accessed from anywhere using a stable internet connection instead of a traditional POS system that requires an on-site setup and stores data on a local server. Even when there is poor or no internment connection, there is no scope of data loss as it all is synced up as soon as the system goes back online.
1. Effortless Menu Management
A fully integrated POS system allows you to easily modify your menu items. From images, food descriptions to image symbols, everything can be easily customised. Even additional configurations like discounts, item availability can all be managed from your POS directly.
2. Automated Order Taking & Processing
Connecting multiple aggregators with your point-of-sale can be done within minutes. With so many food delivery aggregators in the market, a restaurant receives orders from various channels, a cloud POS can display and organise all your orders for you on a single platform. Order status can be updated and tracked on the same in real-time.
It also enables smooth coordination between the chef & the waiter with KOT (Kitchen Order Ticket) & KDS (Kitchen Display System) that ensures hassle-free operations for the staff.
3. Actionable insights
A cloud POS generates easily digestible and actionable insights from a range of detailed reports to streamline your operations & increase revenue. You can analyse the performance of your staff from the insights received & raise the overall productivity of your restaurant by incorporating necessary changes.
4. Customer Relationship Management
Customer relationship management holds more relevance in the food delivery business today than ever with the growing competition. Therefore, you need to stay in touch with the customers to build and retain their trust.
A cloud POS can be integrated with the Customer Relationship Management system (CRM), Loyalty programs, Inventory Management, and Analytics to provide data in one place, reducing manual labor and increasing operational efficiency. This centralized system provided a comprehensive overview of incoming orders, order queues, reducing order-related errors, streamlining their pipeline, and improving turnaround time. With the data collected, you can create personalized loyalty programs and send promotional messages & emails to your customers.
Managing supply chain operations efficiently is the secret recipe to the success of any restaurant. Starting from the procurement of the materials involved in the preparation of dishes to the food served on the table, many factors affect cost. Unless an efficient supply chain management system is in place, unnecessary expenses will burn a hole in your pocket.
Every restaurateur wonders how to streamline restaurant supply chain operations. Gone are the days when restaurants used to depend on manual tasks and spreadsheets for forecasting the material requirement, calculating inventory levels, and dealing with vendors. Using technology to streamline restaurant supply chain management would be the best move for the smooth operations of your restaurant.
How Technology Powers 5 Key Supply Chain Management Areas
While managing your restaurant’s supply chain, 5 major factors need to be focused on. Let’s explore how to streamline restaurant supply chain operations with technology, in detail.
1. Demand Forecasting
A major pain area in supply chain management is forecasting the exact demand. You might have dealt with situations where the predictions went wrong, and you were not able to meet the expectations of customers.
Imagine a case where your restaurant comes up with a new chocolate dessert, a signature dish. If the dessert becomes an instant hit and you can’t keep up with the demand due to the shortage of a major ingredient, you’ll lose business. This is where technology helps you anticipate and mitigate these situations and boost your business.
With India’s leading digital supply chain management platform like inresto SCM , you will get alerts on minimum threshold quantities for ingredients that go into the preparation of the dishes. These alerts come to your rescue in arranging the raw materials required for multiple outlets spread across locations. You no longer have to worry about facing a disappointed customer.
One more scenario is where the food items get wasted due to inaccurate forecasting. In such cases too, digital platforms come to your rescue by providing precise insights that manual systems simply can’t provide.
2. Vendor Management
An integral part of your restaurant operations is to ensure that there is a timely and adequate supply of quality raw materials that meets the standards. Choosing the wrong vendor can prove detrimental as you may end up getting substandard products. As a result, you may receive negative reviews on social media about the poor quality of food served which your business certainly cannot afford. Hence, vendor management is of prime importance, as the quality of food depends on the quality of materials supplied by the vendor.
Using digital platforms, you can compare and select the vendors who can supply the best quality raw materials at the cheapest rates. Hence, it’s pretty easy to streamline vendor management thereby, optimising prices and quantity. The insights offered by digital platforms help you make timely decisions to boost your profits in the long run.
3. Purchase Order Management
If you’re running multiple restaurants across regions, you may face short of raw materials in some outlets. At the same time, in other outlets, you may encounter an opposite problem of food wastage due to overstocking. When you’re placing the orders manually based on the data available in spreadsheets, there are high chances of your forecasts going wrong.
Digital platforms like inresto SCM generate purchase orders for all the outlets based on various demand and forecast insights. Further, it also sends these purchase orders to the relevant vendors. This seamless integration helps your restaurant get rid of the problems of raw material shortage and excess stock.
4. Inventory Management
Spoiled raw materials are a huge cost burden on most restaurants, especially when it comes to perishable items. Further, in case of expensive ingredients, the spoilage costs incurred on your restaurant increases drastically.
For those food ingredients with lower shelf life, you need to be well informed before placing the stock replenishment order. After all, it’s your hard-earned money that goes to waste due to the absence of a proper forecasting system. Thus, using technology to streamline restaurant supply chain operations eliminates all such instances.
With digital SCM platforms, real-time inventory tracking is possible by leveraging the recipe and sub recipe management processes. So, the system automatically updates the inventory status based on orders, and you will receive timely notifications. Now, you can monitor the livestock status from any location without worrying about the drop in inventory levels.
5. Consumption Management
One of the major factors that affect the smooth functioning of any restaurant is the mismatch in stock. Preparing a particular dish requires a certain quantity of food materials. If the ideal quantity of ingredients is missing in the inventory, you can have two possible reasons for it. It can either be due to pilferage or wastage. In this case, using technology to streamline the restaurant’s supply chain would be the best option.
With the help of process-driven supply chain management, wastage and pilferage can be curbed to a large extent. It not only helps to optimize the use of your kitchen resources but also brings down the overall grocery cost.
Theft by staff is another major reason that badly affects consumption management. Manually tracking the inventory is really not practical as you cannot keep an eye on the staff all the time. Moreover, you cannot question the employees without any proper evidence as it affects the employer-employee relations and decreases morale. Now, digital platforms leave no scope for theft and you can track and monitor all your supplies with ease.
Parting Words
Streamlining restaurant supply chain operations assumes significant importance due to the complexity of the inventory management process in today’s times. Though with manual efforts you can optimise day-to-day operation costs, you can only do it to a certain extent. When most businesses are leveraging digital opportunities, you cannot afford to miss the tremendous benefits offered by sophisticated SCM platforms. After all, every penny saved adds to your restaurant’s cash reserves in the long run.
Two critical things for big players in the food industry are generating new customers and retaining existing customers. As all the businesses are moving to the online domain, there is a basic concern on how to retain your customers online.
For every business, building trust and maintaining a healthy relationship with your customers is very important to retain them. After all, trust is what makes your customer confident to choose you again and again over your competitors and hence, benefits you in the long run by helping you build your brand with the trust earned. In this guide, we have mentioned 5 impactful ways to retain your customers online.
5 Ways to Retain Your Customers Online
There are many ways to retain your customers online. Let’s take a look at some of them: –
1. Engage with Your Customers
Engaging and networking is the basic requirement for building a connection with anyone both in personal and professional life. In fact, when it comes to professional life, it becomes a key factor in retaining your customers online. You can use SMS and email service to connect with your customers and create healthy connections. You can even build up a system where you can ask for the customers’ e-mail address and his/her phone number.
Let’s see how you can engage with customers:
Small gestures like wishing someone a happy birthday or sending wishes on different festivals are very important in maintaining a healthy customer relationship.
Send multiple offers and discounts on various occasions to give a special treatment to your customers.
Making a small effort to serve your customers will help you to create faith as well as strengthen the relationship with them. Such healthy relations and regular engagements will help you to retain your customers online and will also help you to increase your customer loyalty.
2. Run a Loyalty Program
Everyone loves to feel special. We human beings are social animals and craving for value and attention from others is our instinct. Whenever someone does something special for us or gives us attention, we feel happy and strengthen our relationship with that person or brand. This is the basic principle of loyalty programs used by multiple businesses for customer retention online and increasing confidence among the customers.
If you’re also looking at ways to retain your customer online for your business, entice your customers with a well-structured loyalty program for your loyal customers today.
Here’s a step-by-step process of creating a good loyalty program: –
Begin collecting personal data such as mobile numbers, e-mails, birthday and anniversary dates, and use them to send personalized messages and offers.
Keep a loyalty point system for every visit and purchase they make and help them avail tempting discounts.
You can even give gifts when they reach certain loyalty points.
Further, you can go one step ahead by giving some free service or a dish on the 10th or 20th order they make.
These slight gestures keep your customers engaged and make them come back to you again and again.
3. Build Connections through Social Media
At present where everything is accessed through the internet, one element that is making a drastic change and gaining huge popularity over the internet world is Social Media. According to many reports and surveys, a person spends most of his time surfing on social media while using internet services. The immense popularity of social media can help you to build up a community and retain your customers online. Social media is such a great tool that connects you and your customer directly.
Make your presence on all possible social media platforms by starting with Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Pinterest.
Post curated and beautifully captured images of all your dishes on these platforms to engage, excite, and entice your future customers.
Design creative posts on the occasions of festivals or any other important days of celebration.
Build connections and look out for the comments and feedback of the customers in the comments section.
Give a quick and timely response and also try to convert negative comments into positive ones if any.
Design your calendar as per the analytics of your social media handles and build a solid community over there.
This is truly the best answer for how to retain your customers online.
4. Robust Feedback System
In this dynamic market, those who are ready to accept and change as per the needs and importance of the business and their customers are the ones who succeed in the long run. So, a genuine feedback system is very important to better understand what you are doing and where you are lacking. Such feedback helps you narrow down the areas of improvement and widen your client base.
Here’s how you build a solid feedback system: .
Always ask for reviews and feedback from your customers on social media and also through e-mail and SMS.
You can generate a system where a customer can give his/her review online on the dish they ordered.
Make sure you reply to your reviews, especially the bad ones. This will help you to improve while making necessary changes and succeed in retaining more customers in the long run.
A Happy Customer is a Loyal Customer.
Getting your customer’s confidence is one of the most arduous tasks for any business. The key to maintaining trust is by offering your customers the best services and making thoughtful gestures to delight them.
So, serve quality food, ensure you offer quick and timely delivery, and provide great service every time to win your customers. Try to please every single customer without leaving any scope for a mistake. The best way to retain your customer is by making them happy in every possible way.
Conclusion
In this competitive world; companies need to build trust and a good connection with their customers for higher returns and better customer retention. So, it’s high time you shift to online methods of customer retention as they are easy and time-saving. The above-mentioned ways to retain your customers online will surely help in the long run of your business if executed properly and promptly. We understand that pleasing the customer is tough. That’s why we’ve created inresto’s feedback solutions to assist you to win and retain your customers.
With the entire nation slowly emerging from the devastating second wave, the restaurant industry has been hit in the gut again, and how. With a few strategic business decisions, we fought the first battle and came out victorious. We can do the same again by banking upon our delivery & takeaway channels that provided an alternative to many restaurants before. But solutions like these have always led to an added expense for the business owner. Restaurants should have their order direct delivery model instead of solely resorting to aggregators and paying hefty commissions.
India’s online food delivery market is expected to grow at a 30.55% CAGR based on revenue by 2024. It’s a tried and tested method that having an online presence can open the door to new orders. Instead of relying on any third party for their website and social media presence, restaurants can now easily incorporate a ‘delivery widget’ to save big and generate orders organically. Around 5,000 names in the industry like Byg Brewski, Sidewok India, La Vie Pizzeria, Defence Bakery 1962 are now self-reliant for their delivery services with inresto’s online ordering solution.
We are now aware of the pressures that restrictions/lockdowns continue to place on the food businesses during the pandemic. Therefore, our goal is to help restaurants facilitate as many orders and with ease. Instead of making a bulky website, inresto has kept the solution to a microsite with a delivery & pickup menu. The same can be easily modified anytime with appealing visuals and smooth UI.
The gap with aggregator models is the ownership of data. During the first phase of lockdown, an average order value for delivery increased by 50% to 60%, as most customers were ordering for their loved ones too. Now, with authorities confirming that the food can never be the source of virus spreading, the numbers are likely to increase this time. As a restaurant, it is important to let the customers know that you are delivering to their doorsteps. SMS, emails, and even social media channels can be effectively utilised to run campaigns & promote delivery services. Correct targeting, delivery timings, offers, menu updates can be easily communicated through the inresto campaign module.
An evolving business model and the proper guidance can help a restaurant make an easy transition to delivery & marketing solutions. With inresto’s online ordering solution, a restaurant can tick off four major steps from their ‘How to boost sales in lockdown’ checklist:
A digital microsite for delivery & pickup
Receive multi-source orders on the same microsite
Generate orders through SMS, Emails & Whatsapp
Amplify orders through Social Media- Instagram & Facebook
While we are supposed to maintain distance from mostly everything and everyone right now, food is something that has always brought people closer. At inresto by Dineout, we are always at the helm of helping our restaurant partners. Our aim is to help you deliver happiness to your customers while reducing overhead and additional expenses. Reach out to us at contact@inresto.com for any restaurant solution, and we will do our bit to sail through it again together.
Hit by the second wave of COVID-19, India saw many hardships. Industries slowed down, and all of us suffered losses in one form or another. At the same time, some good things happened. Each of us held on and sought a ray of hope for a better tomorrow and found solace in something.
The Food & Beverage industry found its way to deal with the crisis. Some said patience is key, while others found alternate avenues to change the growth curve in business from sloping down to rising uphill. We bring you the stories of such warriors through ‘Humans Of Restaurants’- An insider’s view into the struggles, efforts, and motivations of some of the most influential and remarkable figures within the industry.
Snippets from some of the stories that lightened the mood and induced motivation:
1. Kabir Suri, Co-founder, Azure Hospitality & VP, National Restaurant Association of India
(Dhaba, Mamagoto, Sly Granny, Foxtrot)
Communication is the key, and around these times, we keep a constant check with our teams and staff members across the cities. We have also organized a vaccination drive for our frontline workers in Delhi and are expanding the same to other cities. Food consumption in any form, be it dining, delivery, or takeaway, will always remain a basic need and a social habit. People are ordering in, and when things get better, they will dine out with friends and family, and we foresee the same happening soon.
2. Rachel Goenka, Founder & CEO, The Chocolate Spoon Company
The lessons learned from the first lockdown served us well. We pivoted back to delivery-only formats and continued to vigorously cut down fixed costs to the bare minimum. We are successfully running multiple brands from one kitchen. We are also encouraging our customers to order directly with the restaurant brands. Parting with 25%-35% of revenue has never worked. We are going out of our way to explain to our customers that ordering directly from us is the only way to ensure our survival. We have integrated online ordering, improved our customer interface, and are offering discounts. We also offer products exclusive to those who #OrderDirect.
With inresto’s campaign module, we can market ourselves better as our focus is on promoting ‘direct ordering’ to our customers. We can offer the best deals on our platform, and whatever we are saving by not paying the aggregators is helping us bridge the gap from the loss of revenue for dine-in.
Let’s utilise this time to make our businesses more efficient by incorporating strategic moves. We will be back sooner than we know.
4. Jaydeep Mukherjee, Brand Head, Smoke House Deli
As our mode of business is mostly through delivery these days, we have the support of technology like inresto campaigns to help us promote these services and let our customers know that we are there for them. These are times to consolidate our strengths, unify as one body and take necessary steps to maximise returns for our businesses and weather this storm. A lot of local help and support is the need of the hour to keep the restaurant businesses afloat. Therefore, we preach and urge people to #OrderLocal #OrderDirect. If you can’t go out to eat, let us bring your favourite meals to you. Sometimes things are not under our control, but they always get better in the end as we have experienced the last time. Let’s keep fighting.
5. Chef Irfan Pabaney, Country Head, SodaBottleOpenerWala
It is vital to keep going while preserving the strength and motivation of the staff members. So when the second wave was picking up and a possible lockdown was in sight, we tried to put as much money as possible in the hands of our staff in the form of a bonus and encashment of any pending paid leaves. At the same time, we are also trying to keep our staff employed via the delivery and takeaway business. Currently, all our efforts are focused on encouraging customers to order directly from our outlets and inresto_by_dineout ‘s campaign module is helping a great deal in reaching out to our guests with this message.
6. Parvez Nisar, General Manager, Four Points by Sheraton, Chennai
We follow strict safety and sanitization protocols in and around our premises. Our business strategies evolve with time and the situation. Currently, we are operating at a minimal capacity and by the mandates of the regional government. There has been a definite hit in our sales, but we have been working on other revenue streams. During the first lockdown, many luxury dining restaurants and hotels also opened their door to delivery services. With Marriott on Wheels, we are able to deliver fine dining with a dash of happiness to our customers.
Time and situation will keep on changing, but our industry will always hold its value as our scope of business is to provide for our guests’ fundamental needs, which is a comfortable and safe stay & food.”
Goa is a tourist hot spot, and the major source of our sale is tourism be it foreign or domestic. For local brands, takeaway and delivery are the best alternatives at this time as they have a local clientele in the area and do not depend too heavily on tourism.
While we patiently wait for this to pass, we make sure our employees stay motivated and don’t lose hope. We follow an Open door policy at work where they are free to have any conversation with us. From engaging in conversations to doing fun Hospitality quizzes, we constantly stay in touch. Apart from that, we like to embrace the quality time we get and spend it with online gaming clubs like Call Of Duty and indulging in Fish Curry Rice Treats.
This initiative was like a great support system for the restaurateurs to let them know that they are alone in this.
These stories bring out the steps taken by the restaurants for them to sail through this storm. Innovative solutions like Online Order from inresto have helped many restaurants to own their website that facilitates direct orders and saves on hefty commissions charged by the aggregators. The solution also provides restaurants an opportunity to own the customer data that can be used to retarget customers with various deals and discounts. Many restaurants like Alma Bakery Cafe have relied on these solutions to grow and maintain their business in current times.
To further retain and attract more customers, restaurants rely on various marketing solutions like social media ads, mobile banners on the dineout app, etc.
An excellent restaurant or a hotel runs in sync with three main departments:customers, operations, and your partners. Maximizing the performance and maintenance of each of these departments is important in generating decent revenue and reputation. However, every institution wants to cut its expenditures in the process.
One way to ensure this balance is by elevating your food cost control strategy with a vendor Management System. Food distributors and vendors come under the domain of partners and they are very important for the success of hotels and restaurants. If you’re looking for answers on how to elevate food cost control for your restaurant, then you are in the right place. Let’s first understand what a vendor management system is.
What is a Vendor Management System (VMS)?
A vendor management system is a way many companies or organizations reduce their expenditures on food delivery and high potential future risks by taking the required steps. It also involves a high-quality delivery experience for the customer and connecting with the vendors in the long run.
You can create an efficient vendor management system for controlling your cost by:
Searching for the best suitable vendors
Comparing prices of different vendors and companies that provide them
Short-listing their services
Giving higher priorities to the quality of their work
You should also focus on your responsibilities by always paying on time and trying to develop a better connection for more strong results.
Advantages of a Vendor Management System
There are many benefits for organizations having a better vendor management system. Here are our top 9 benefits of having a vendor management system:
1. Helps you Pick the Right Vendor
By having a highly efficient Vendor management system, your organization can select the right vendors in the right budget. You can choose vendors under your budget by comparing the rates of different vendors and selecting the one that suits your needs. Having multiple options to pick from is a complete win-win situation for you. You can also negotiate by cutting costs as there’s higher competition among the vendors to get some work.
2. Internet is the Way
The best way to cut off a lot of human and economic resources is to bring all your vendors online. This move will not only help you cut prices, but it will also help you develop a stronger connection and optimize your services. From ordering food to raising invoices, it can be completely transferred to online payment saving a lot of your resources and time.
3. Better Management of Vendors
If you have teams of multiple vendors, then it is important to regulate and keep them managed for the proper utilization of every team and individual. You need to manage contacts, details, locations, and orders in a very efficient way. Otherwise, you may end up complicating things, creating trouble, and losing money.
Having a better VMS will help your organization in maintaining records, getting your trust, and improving the efficiency in all your process.
4. Performance management
It’s important to have a performance management system for your vendors. This system can be in the form of grades, stars, or even reviews given from customers and your department as per their services.
Having better performance management will help you understand what strategies are working for you and who is performing better. Then, you can use this information to build a more efficient plan and select the right vendors. This plan will ultimately improve the performance of your organization.
5. Signing Contracts while Employing
Get a contract filled from a vendor for a certain period, as this will reduce the risk of them leaving abruptly or without notice. Instead, include a provision that ensures they give a month’s prior notice before leaving and set penalties for some rash behavior. These obligations bring out efficient quality work from them and reduce the risk of various problems.
6. Tracking
Use a GPS service to track your vendors and keep records of deliveries and time efficiency. This type of tracking will help you understand if a vendor is involved in mishaps or not.
As we’ve studied the advantages of the vendor management system, we know the benefits outnumber its challenges. However, understanding them is important for things to run smoothly for your organization. Here are some challenges you may encounter are –
1. Vendors Not Abiding By your Rules
You may encounter that many vendors will not perform as per your demands. So, it’s critical to lay a framework and certain guidelines to be followed by everyone to prevent many problems. Further, you need to monitor your vendors and let them know how important your rules are.
2. Setting Unrealistic Deadlines
Always remember to plan things than are practical and realistic, never set unrealistic deadlines and delivery times. It will affect your relationship with vendors and their efficiency too.
3. Not Being Adaptable
It’s critical on your part to adapt quickly to the needs of the market. If your strategy is not giving you desired results, then you need to change the strategy. It is never a good decision to stick with a plan that’s not fruitful. It is a game of trial and error.
You will encounter many more challenges from payment, sick leaves to a lot more. It is all about understanding the situation and acting wisely. If you’re curious enough to ask yourself how to elevate food cost control, you will surely find answers to these challenges.
Summing Up
We started this topic by asking “How to elevate food cost control” and we learned many ways to do it. A proper vendor management system plays a key role in cutting your prices down. The various advantages of a vendor management system help you to run things smoothly and increase your profits as well. We got the basic idea of how we can cut our prices by using proper planning and using the right resources. You can use these principles in many other aspects and can get a lot more benefits. Create the right plans and strategies and execute them well, and if they don’t work, change them.
The Covid-19 pandemic has made our social life almost come to a stand-still. Unlike the earlier days when families used to dine at restaurants and hang out at coffee chains, nowadays, most customers prefer to stay at home. As per Bloomberg reports, one-third of the restaurants in the US may face permanent closure this year.
If you own one such restaurant, don’t worry as things will gradually get better. The restaurants can resume indoor service and operate with 25-50% capacity. However, what you need to assess: are you well prepared to meet the expectations of the diners in the post-COVID world?
One of the major challenges you would face is how to train restaurant staff after the pandemic. The fear of getting contracted by the infection has made customers more cautious and they are concerned about hygiene and safety measures.
Training your Restaurant Staff in the Post Pandemic World
Gone are the days when all the new staff members at your restaurant gathered in a meeting room, and the training sessions used to be delivered for numerous employees together. As social distancing has become the norm in the post-COVID world, you cannot afford to groom the staff using traditional training methods anymore. In almost all other industries, the training and meeting sessions have gone virtual including educational institutions, software companies, pharmaceutical majors, and financial giants.
All you need to come up with is a fresh approach on how to train restaurant staff after the pandemic.
How Technology will Change the Way Restaurants Function
As you are gearing up to resume your restaurant operations, the first challenge will be to train staff on new technology and systems. Though you can have plenty of jobs for new recruits, you still need experienced staff to lead the important roles in front office, warehouse, and kitchen. As discussed earlier, the traditional methods of managing restaurant operations must undergo a drastic change.
Your staff needs to be well versed in using software systems and processes as technology plays an integral role in POS terminals, inventory management, labour management, and other systems. The senior staff members who are not tech-savvy need to get accustomed to the latest technologies and systems. As everyone prefers mobile phones, you need to ensure that training options are also available on the mobile platforms.
Using eLearning to Train Restaurant Staff
As we cannot travel like before, using eLearning to train restaurant staff has found increased acceptance across industries. There are several E-learning courses that have been of immense help to the restaurants in training their employees. With these courses, the restaurant staff doesn’t have to travel, there’s no need for a live instructor, and the classes are available on-demand. As interaction is the most important element in any training, the E-learning interface is lively and keeps the learners engaged.
Technology plays an integral part in restaurant management, thanks to apps such as inresto that help in integrating both front-end and back-end operations.
It’s essential for your new employees to have a fair idea about the various aspects of restaurant management. With the help of E-learning courses, you can train the restaurant staff in advance before they work in the live environment. However, you might be thinking that the scenarios will be entirely different while working in the actual world. There’s always the option of delivering training in real-time as and when the staff needs it. To strengthen the training methods, E-learning companies have come up with app walk-throughs for individual processes. This feature makes life much easier for the restaurant staff.
How E-learning Benefits Restaurant Management
Let’s look at the various areas in restaurant management operations that are covered as part of E-learning. Due to these courses, how to train restaurant staff after the pandemic is not an issue anymore.
Restaurant Inventory Management
New employees at your restaurant will get a fair idea about the various aspects of inventory management through e-learning programs. Inventory management is much easier through restaurant management software as it leads to leaner inventory levels. Further, these systems also help you identify wasteful expenditure and the reasons it leads to an increase in food costs.
Through this identification, unnecessary costs can be eliminated after understanding the root cause. You can maintain the optimum inventory levels as the software suggests the right amount of inventory to be maintained accurately. This accurate forecasting lets you calculate the amount of food to be prepared and cut down food wastage to a great extent.
Labour Management Operations
Manually scheduling the employees to work in various shifts is one of the biggest challenges of any restaurant. It’s not a pain anymore as software tools let you automate shift schedules. It also checks the timings of each shift schedule against the local and state labour laws to ensure that regulatory compliance is met. The staff’s punching timings, overtime, and break timings can be easily viewed from anywhere using the software. It’s of real help for employees undergoing e-learning lessons as they get to know the labour management practices before working in the actual world.
Reports Generation
E-learning lessons can take the employees through the various aspects of report generation. You can take accurate decisions with the help of real-time information updates. For the managers in charge of several restaurants, the performance figures of each restaurant will be available at their fingertips. They can access the reports from any location and from any device. You also get the option of creating tasks and assigning them to various users. If they do not complete the tasks on time or if there are any deviations, the person who created the task will be alerted.
If you feel that the labour costs are too high or the stock of inventory is running too low, you can take immediate decisions. There’s no need to check multiple places as the information is readily available at your fingertips.
Parting Words
During the pandemic, using e-learning to train restaurant staff is, without a doubt, a real blessing. However, there are certain areas where hands-on training is necessary. Hence, the right approach would be to come up with a mix of both traditional methods and e-learning techniques.
