Articles

In today’s digital age, customers expect to be able to order food from their smartphones with the touch of a button. A digital menu can help your restaurant keep up with the latest trends and satisfy your customers’ desires. With our digital menus, you can customize your orders according to each customer’s preference, and say goodbye to human errors!  We personally witnessed the benefits of digital menus in one of our client’s outlets. In this situation, it was a lunch crowd with patrons occupying eight tables and simultaneously deciding what to order. At one of those tables, eleven patrons who had just walked in, scanned the table-specific QR code to place their orders within a short space of time. No waiter was in sight nor were they needed. Within a minute or two, order after order came scrolling out of the merchant’s thermal printer. Here are the benefits we noticed from this experience: 1. Digital Menus Improves Service Speed With digital menus, customers can place their orders immediately. There was no need to flag a waiter for service which can be an absolute nightmare during peak hours or there is a non-observant waiter, not forgetting as well when patrons are seated in an obscure location in the restaurant. Customers can choose to place paid orders ahead of time so they are ready to eat the moment they are seated. 2. Serve More Customers When customers are served faster, you will be able to serve more customers with the same amount of dining space. Reduce the number of times you turn away customers because you could no longer accommodate them. 3. Digital Menus Eliminate Human Error We are all too familiar with waiters getting our orders wrong. With digital menus, the customer is the one that is placing the order and each order is printed. Reference can be made to the printout if the accuracy of the order is in question. Another common sight at restaurants is a waiter with his hands full with orders scrambling up and down between tables wondering who placed the order. 4. Swift Menu Changes Ever tried after taking some time deciding on an order only to find out when you finally get the attention of a waiter that the item is not available? We all know how inconvenient that is. With a digital menu, menu managers can hide or place items out of stock with a simple few clicks. Changes to the menu can be made quickly and reflected on the front end. This includes changes in prices or adding and removing items. Try doing this at the same speed and cost with printed menus. 5. Personalised Service With digital menus, waiters will not only know what is ordered and which table the order came from but the customer’s name. Imagine how special a customer would feel if they received their order while being addressed by name. Should this feature not fit into your business model, simply turn off the option to capture customers’ info for dine-in orders. The image on the right is a glimpse of the order dashboard of our system with a summary of the actual order received from the eleven patrons. Order managers can click on any order and view the order details, create another order printout if needed and move orders to the completed order status when a customer has finally paid. 6. Order History For Easy Reordering Customers who log in when they order will find an order history whenever they order and they can reorder the same order with a few simple clicks. 7. Capturing Data Analytics Many restaurants are still driving their businesses blind, with the FoodVillage digital dine-in menu every single order is captured and displayed beautifully to empower you to understand customer behaviour. From the top-selling products, the payment type, peak hours, customer’s total spend and the number of orders and much more. Learn more from our article: How You Can Benefit From FoodVillage’s Detailed Sales Data Analytics 8. Waiters Are Freed Up To Focus On Order Fulfilment With digital menus, say goodbye to the time it takes to jot down an order. The time saved can be used to focus on the delivery of orders. This also means cost savings from the additional staff that won’t be required during peak hours or seasons. It’s no wonder in Japan, restaurants can operate without any waiters. Worried about upsells without a waiter? Structure the upsells right into your menu so you are guaranteed that customers are receiving upsells every single time. Customers get a better deal and you increase your revenues! 9. Immediate And Designated Order Printouts Every single order if you so choose get printed and with specific dishes printed to designated stations. For example, drink orders would be sent with only printouts of drinks sent to the drink station while the complete order is sent to the front of house. 10. A Better System While Lowering Cost With FoodVillage’s digital menus, the cost savings are obvious. For a fraction of the cost of hiring one waiter, you will now have a virtual waiter at every single table that is ready ALL the time, makes no errors, collects payments, upsells customers, registers customer data, records order data for analytics, prints out orders while organising each order systematically, doesn’t get tired nor complains and doesn’t ask for a raise. But wait, it gets even better! We have only addressed the dine-in benefits. With no additional cost, you get pickups, deliveries and table reservations on one platform! It’s no wonder why McDonald’s now uses digital menus as well as table QR ordering. Other fast-food joints have taken notice and are already jumping on the bandwagon. Times have changed, don’t get left behind. Better yet, you don’t have to spend millions on hardware and software with FoodVillage. Eliminate the number of lost customers who avoided eating at your restaurant just because another restaurant could process their orders much faster. Imagine what a simple change could do to your