Potential customers are interacting with your brand and products in new ways every day. So why not develop commerce channels to meet them there? By having an omni-channel ordering strategy you stand a better chance of capturing more orders and thus, more revenue. But what exactly is omni-channel ordering? It’s simple. It’s the process of setting up various ordering channels across mediums, such as online, email, via marketplaces or in-store technology, that allows customers to explore your menu with the ability to place an order no matter where they are.
This setup is extremely beneficial for catering, prepared meals and food service businesses, as it can help streamline operational and production processes, and most importantly increase sales through wider options for order placement from customers. Below are our top 4 ways omni-channel ordering helps catering and food service businesses.
There are many ways your customers may interact with your company and products, such as directly on your website, social media, in-store, advertisements, events and your website. It is very common for customers to engage with several of these touchpoints before completing a purchase, so why not create an ordering experience supporting as many channels as possible?
Some customers will be loyal to your brand, so they’ll want to shop with you directly. But others who aren’t loyal may care about who has the lowest price as an example, and prefer to shop on marketplaces. By supporting ordering via your ecommerce, manual order entry via staff member, marketplace orders such as Instacart, and in-store technology such as kiosks, you can capture the entire customer ordering ecosystem.
With so many channels for receiving customer orders you may think this will cause a massive headache with multiple processes to manage, systems to train your team on and menus to update. But by partnering with a comprehensive prepared food and catering ordering management system, such as FoodStorm, you can sell your food across all these channels with one central backend. This central backend allows you to have one order repository for your staff to manage, no matter how the order comes in. That means one system to train your team on, one process to manage and comprehensive order fulfillment.
With less operational complexities, you and your team can focus on more important things, like growing your business and finding new ways to market and sell your catering and prepared foods. No more wasted man hours on repetitive tasks due to an inefficient order management process with too many caveats and nuances. By reclaiming that bandwidth, you can engage in exciting business projects such as developing new holiday menus, partnering with other local businesses or breaking into new catering areas such as corporate catering or even weddings.
For the ultimate omni-channel ordering experience, you’ll want to partner with a catering software company that allows for an open API. An open API will provide the other software and systems you work with the ability to send orders to your order management system freely, setting up a truly integrated system for all your technology to cross-communicate. When your systems can cross-communicate, your manual and administrative workload is lightened, mistakes are reduced and work efficiency is increased.
FoodStorm has spent over 15 years developing software suited for caterers and food service businesses, focused on reducing administrative work and growing sales. Now with the help of Instacart, we’re the only omni-channel ordering platform your business will ever need.
Contact us today to learn more about our features and how it can help your business.
