Off-premise Dining – Part 6 – Back office works
Multi-channel ordering and integration
When you deal with online ordering, you deal with many ordering channels. You might have your online portal, aggregator’s portal, social media product catalog, and even chatbot ordering process.
All these channels handle the front-end ordering process and redirect orders to your restaurant. Having these channels integrated into a single database system is a challenge. Not all POS systems integrate with all ordering channels. Many POS solution providers are working toward the integration to address this challenge.
If your POS system integrates with an ordering channel, you can manage the menu setup in one entry point. Otherwise, you have to consider the workflow to maintaining the menu administration in two separate systems. This situation can increase human error in the process. Currently, the restaurant and the delivery aggregator handle each channel separately. Coordination between the two admin teams will add to the delay in launching promotions.
Back office integration
Another challenge to address is maintaining unified reports when you have several ordering channels.
If the channels are not integrated, you will have individual sales reports from each channel! That’s a big challenge and again time-consuming task to merge individual sales reports. It becomes a bigger problem when you add the inventory and cost control to the mix.
Many restaurants working with aggregators re-punch the orders into their POS to overcome this challenge. This is a cumbersome task when you receive a large number of orders through an aggregator. This process will consume lots of time from your POS operator, and still, the risk of mistakes is there.
A similar challenge is with online payments. In your online ordering or aggregator process, you need the payment consolidation. Having a payment process integrated with your ordering channels and merge them into the POS system is helpful. Since the aggregators are taking their commissions before paying you, the POS system should be capable of discounting the aggregators’ orders payment based on the aggregators’ commissions.
All these details contribute to the timing you have to spend in the back office to keep your books tidy and generate proper reports.
If your POS system offers the integration with the online ordering platforms, its’ a bonus. But the fact is, no system provides full integration yet, as the market is dynamic and keeps changing.
One more thing, the integrated system helps you to maintain the inventory and accounting practices easier.
If you don’t have an integrated POS system, or you don’t want to invest further to interface OLO channels with your POS system, then you need to look to your accounting and inventory system integration capabilities. The back-office systems, accounting, and inventory software should be able to import data from different front-ends. This situation is different from restaurant to restaurant and needs to address it per case, as there are many accounting systems and POS systems in operation in the market.
You need to think of the budget based on the impact of online ordering in the entire business and then consider the integration. The integration needs to be build up based on the growth of the operation in multi-channel order.
Large enterprises, since they have the financial muscle, might approach integration differently. In the end, as I said, it’s a decision that the business needs to make based on its case.
Review Management
Collecting and managing reviews applies to off-premise dining as it does to the dine-in experience. Especially when you establish your digital presence, it will help you to go up on the search ranking. You need to encourage your customers to leave a review in any review channels they can. More reviews mean better visibility.
The same is with the restaurant information and listing. Your restaurant listing in online channels should present your off-premise dining experience. It should inform the viewers that you do provide the service and related products.
There’s been a frustrating surge of bad reviews on delivery that is dragging down restaurants’ credibility due to factors outside restaurant control.
You should treat off-premise dining like the on-premise experience. You need to pay attention to the details and all similar practices of the on-premise operation.
This is a new norm that will not go away soon.
