Food For Thought: Using Technology to Improve Delivery Margins

We sat down with Matthew Burnett, Team Lead for the Account Executive Sales Team at Deliverect, to discuss the current and future dynamics of how technology interacts with the restaurant industry. We dive into the various technologies available to restaurant owners today and what problems they solve. With this, we discuss how individual restaurants can combine specific technological tools to optimize their business’ delivery margins in the digital age.

So, What Happened to Delivery During the Pandemic?

Before the pandemic, most restaurant tech stacks consisted solely of a POS system. When businesses were met with the pandemic, the existing technology couldn’t solve newer challenges around “delivery” and online ordering at the time. Restaurant owners worried about how they would cater to their customers’ needs by ensuring top food quality, delivery time, and processing orders quickly without error. Most restaurants signed up for multiple delivery platforms, creating chaos. The operation became less seamless, and service was at an all-time low. Businesses were hiring and paying more to individuals to combat these operational issues, but tablets were being managed inefficiently. These delivery apps added to operation confusion, which only compounded as many restaurants chose separate menus depending on the app. 

How Did Technology Fix Delivery Problems Caused by the Pandemic?

We used technology to solve the technological problems in the first place, emphasizing efficiency. For people running restaurants these days, it’s about targeting the new generation. The booming popularity of delivery apps has raised questions about how to deal with it. Restaurants can leverage technology and get an order right out the door without hiring an individual with basic problem-solving skills. How can we overcome these challenges?

1. Restaurants need an integration solution like Deliverect to eliminate the need to punch in orders manually. The result? A streamlined online order flow, less workload for employees, and no more chaos in the kitchen. When restaurants deal with multiple delivery apps, employees make more mistakes and create customer dissatisfaction. With an integration solution, orders are passed directly from customers to the POS to the kitchen, limiting error margins, all while collecting valuable data.

2. Manage menus like a champ. Most restaurants are on multiple delivery platforms, including in-house delivery, Uber Eats, GrubHub, DoorDash, and many others. Managing products across these apps causes chaos, confusing restaurant owners and customers. With Deliverect, all of the products from the POS are dragged onto the front end of the Deliverect platform, where they can be managed collectively and then published on the platforms in one go.

3. Don’t let the data sit. Restaurant owners use various delivery channels simultaneously to maximize revenue by giving the best delivery experience to customers. By managing menus in one place, restaurateurs can strategically extract data to grow profit and upsell specific menus. By releasing a new price set at a particular time across delivery platforms, restaurant owners can see data across that period using the Deliverect app and understand if higher prices at certain times lead to a drop in sales. If the sales remain the same - the restaurant has gained some value-adding data!

Since the pandemic, maximizing sales through delivery has been a core mission of restaurants globally. We saw an uptick of restaurants during and after this time to be on every delivery app possible and build a direct delivery channel to their customers. By designing their own websites and delivery platforms, businesses are circumventing lost commissions, and their customers are usually also offered a benefit to make the experience of ordering from their restaurant worthwhile. Creating and launching a proprietary delivery fleet is not a small investment. Businesses can also lean on last-mile delivery networks to help get to customers directly. However, creating a self-sufficient delivery ecosystem will limit reliance on third-party apps, allowing access to even more direct data to make better decisions for the business.

Restaurant customers will likely be attracted to a website that offers better discounts, good quality, and occasional offers. Platforms like Deliverect can monitor the restaurant's data and analytics to target customers’ needs by generating different promo codes and introducing deals that will make them hungry for more. 

Deliverect can help change the future of restaurants by having a single touchpoint to stay organized, limit error margins, test opportunities for growth, collect valuable data, and extract insights. 

Want to hear more about some of the major obstacles and successes in the restaurant industry today? Check out more episodes from our Food for Thought series here.