Off Premise Platform for Profitability
Introduction
In today’s competitive restaurant industry, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) must embrace innovative strategies to thrive. One of the most impactful ways to boost top-line sales and boost profitability is by leveraging an off-premise platform and other digital tactics. These tools enable restaurants to efficiently manage and optimize their takeout, delivery, and digital storefront operations, creating new revenue streams and reaching a broader customer base.
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Understanding the Off Premise Platform
An off-premise platform is an essential component of a modern restaurant’s operational ecosystem. Alongside the Back of House (BOH) Platform and Point of Sale (POS) System, the off-premise platform is designed to handle all activities that occur outside the restaurant’s physical location. This includes both digital orders and digital interactions from your customers. The orders could be delivery, takeout, catering, or even reservations. The interactions revolve around your digital storefront and include things like listings, rating/reviews, paid ads, and social media posts.
The rise of digital technology has revolutionized the restaurant industry, transforming how customers discover, interact with, and purchase from their favorite dining establishments. The off-premise platform has become indispensable for restaurants aiming to capture this evolving consumer behavior and meet the increasing demand for convenience and accessibility.
Tech Stack Framework
In the next 2-5 years, restaurant technology will simplify significantly, reducing the need for multiple vendors. This consolidation aims to streamline operations and management for restaurants, making it easier to manage everything from customer interactions to back-office functions. Envision a world where your restaurant operates flawlessly, with fewer technological hassles, allowing you more time to focus on what truly matters – delivering outstanding food and exceptional service to your customers.
The future of restaurant technology hinges on three essential platforms: the off-premise platform, the POS System, and the BOH Platform. These pillars work together to create a robust and efficient ecosystem for restaurant operations, simplifying processes for restaurateurs.
The off-premise platform is the linchpin of modern restaurant operations, managing everything outside the restaurant’s physical location. It encompasses digital storefronts, online ordering systems, delivery management, social media interactions, and email marketing. In a world where digital presence is as crucial as physical presence, having a comprehensive off-premise platform is non-negotiable. It ensures that your restaurant remains accessible to customers at all times, providing a seamless experience whether they are ordering takeout, reserving a table, or engaging with your brand online. This platform is the gateway to reaching new customers and retaining existing ones, driving incremental traffic and boosting top-line sales.
Next is the POS System, which centralizes menu, order, and customer data. This system is the heart of internal operations management, facilitating everything from order processing to inventory tracking. A robust POS System ensures that your restaurant operates smoothly, with accurate order handling, efficient Kitchen Display System (KDS), and integrated payment processing. It also provides valuable insights into customer preferences and sales trends, enabling you to make data-driven decisions to supercharge your service and menu offerings. In essence, the POS System is the backbone of your restaurant’s day-to-day operations, ensuring that every transaction is recorded accurately and every customer leaves satisfied.
The third pillar is the BOH Platform, which handles procurement, labor scheduling, inventory management, and financial reporting. This platform is essential for planning and measuring operations, providing a clear overview of your restaurant’s performance. Effective back-office management ensures that you have the right amount of stock, the right number of staff, and a clear understanding of your financial health. It helps in identifying cost-saving opportunities, optimizing labor schedules, and ensuring compliance with financial regulations. By automating these back-office functions, you can reduce administrative burdens and focus more on strategic growth and customer satisfaction.
As restaurant technology continues to evolve, the integration of these three platforms will become increasingly seamless. The goal is to create a unified system where data flows effortlessly between the off-premise platform, POS System, and BOH Platform. This integration will reduce the complexity of managing multiple vendors and provide a more cohesive and efficient operational framework. When these three pillars work in unison, this gives the restaurateur a robust, yet simple ecosystem for easier operations.
The Landscape of Digital Storefronts
In today’s restaurant landscape, the importance of a robust digital storefront cannot be overstated. As technology continues to reshape the industry, the fastest-growing brands are investing as much in their digital presence as they do in their physical storefronts. A digital storefront is not just an online menu or a website; it’s a multifaceted platform that serves as the gateway to your brand for many customers. In fact, a well-maintained digital storefront can drive as much traffic and sales as a brick-and-mortar location.
Think of your digital storefront as having multiple doors, each leading potential customers to your restaurant. Some of these doors are massive, like Google, Yelp, and Apple Maps, while others are more niche but equally important. Each door represents digital foot traffic, akin to the physical foot traffic that passes by your restaurant every day. Ensuring these digital doors are always open and inviting is crucial. This means regularly updating your hours, menus and restaurant information, responding to reviews, and engaging with customers online. By maximizing the number of people who walk through these digital doors, you create demand and drive sales.
However, there’s a crucial caveat to this strategy: driving traffic to your digital storefront is pointless if your operations aren’t ready to handle it. Before investing heavily in digital marketing, make sure your food items are perfected, your staff is well-trained, and your ratings are consistently positive. High-quality operations are the foundation of any successful restaurant. Without them, even the best marketing efforts will be wasted. Poor service, inconsistent food quality, or negative reviews can quickly turn potential customers away, rendering your marketing dollars ineffective.
A polished digital storefront starts with finalizing your food items and ensuring they meet your quality standards. This means consistent recipes, reliable suppliers, and a well-trained kitchen staff. Once the product is solid, focus on training your front-of-house staff. They should be knowledgeable about the menu, courteous, and efficient. Positive customer experiences lead to good reviews, which are essential for attracting new customers.
Marketing efforts must align with operational readiness. No amount of digital advertising will fix poor operations. It’s like lighting your marketing budget on fire. Customers attracted by appealing ads but disappointed by their actual experience will not return and might even leave negative reviews. Therefore, before ramping up your digital marketing, ensure your restaurant’s operations are dialed first.
Hospitality Moment
In the world of restaurant branding, creating memorable hospitality moments is essential for building a lasting connection with your customers. Every great restaurant brand is often remembered for one or two standout elements that resonate deeply with its patrons. These unique touches are what customers recall long after their visit and what compels them to return. They become the simple yet powerful tools that turn satisfied customers into enthusiastic brand evangelists without them even realizing it.
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A hospitality moment is more than just good service; it’s about creating an emotional connection that leaves a lasting impression. It’s the “wow” factor that distinguishes your restaurant from the competition. These moments can be as simple as a heartfelt greeting or as unique as a quirky tradition that customers come to love and expect.
Consider the following examples of memorable hospitality moments that have successfully connected customers to various brands:
"My pleasure" instead of "You're welcome"
This subtle change in phrasing can make interactions feel more personal and genuinely appreciative, leaving customers with a positive feeling.
Speedy Service
Offering fast and reliable delivery ensures convenience and satisfaction for customers.
Memorable naming conventions
Incorporating playful and culturally relevant names into your menu items can make the dining experience more fun and relatable, especially for younger demographics.
Portion sizes
Offering generous portion sizes or unique presentation styles create a memorable (and instagramable) aspect of your restaurant that can accelerate word of mouth.
These hospitality moments are not just about the immediate experience but about crafting memories that customers associate with your brand. They help foster a sense of belonging by making it easy for them to communicate your brand to their friends and family.
To effectively implement hospitality moments, consider what aligns best with your brand’s identity and resonates with your target audience. Remember, your moment doesn’t have to be truly ‘one of a kind’, but it should stand out and be relatively unique to your hyperlocal area.
In summary, hospitality moments are the key to transforming customer interactions into lasting memories. By identifying and incorporating one or two distinctive elements into your service, you can create a powerful connection with your customers, turning them into loyal advocates for your brand.
The Real How-To: Mastering Off Premise
Operations with the 3 C's Framework
To successfully navigate the world of off-premise operations and drive profitability, the 3 C’s framework is essential: Create, Capture, and Convert demand into profits. Each step in this process is crucial for maximizing incremental sales and profit. Chances are, you’re already implementing aspects of this framework in your business. Here’s a deeper dive into how you can leverage it effectively:
Creating Demand Drives Digital Traffic
The first step is creating demand, which is all about driving digital traffic to your restaurant. This involves building awareness, acquiring customers, and attributing your marketing efforts correctly.
Awareness
People search for pizza and find your restaurant. This could be any cuisine type or even specific dishes.
Acquisition
When people want pizza, they search for your restaurant. Again this could be for any cuisine or dish type. The more they search for your brand, the more awareness you have
Attribution
You’re ready for attribution when your brand awareness is high. This is how you grab the attention of an audience that’s hungry and ready to eat. However, without awareness, this is often where the most dollars are wasted from restaurants.
Pro Tip:
If you want to measure where you’re at in the 3 A’s, a small daily purchase of your branded keyword can provide you valuable data and insights that tell you not just where you are, but how to increase traffic from search.
Capturing Demand
Once you’ve created demand, the next step is capturing that intent and converting it into orders. This can include online orders, reservations, catering, or events.
1st Party Ordering: This is the most profitable channel as it involves no commissions. Ensure your ordering system includes:
- Customized options
- Automatic upsell engine
- Customer data on all orders
- Account sign up and re-order capabilities
- POS integration
- Digital wallets (iOS and Android)
3rd Party Ordering: This captures demand that third-party platforms create for you. Capitalizing on orders from these platforms can bring incremental revenue to your restaurant, however, in order to execute on these platforms, rely on strong POS integration, not tablets.
Converting Orders into Profits
Finally, converting demand into profits involves turning orders into repeat customers and managing costs effectively.
- Integration: In order to execute on these orders, they must be converted into the operational processes of your kitchen. POS integration makes orders the same no matter which channel they came from.
- Repeat Customers: Converting first-time customers into repeat patrons is key to success in any business. Repeat customers are the cornerstone of profitability.
- Dynamic Pricing: Implement dynamic pricing to navigate the demand fluctuations and pricing strategies of third-party delivery platforms and always ensure each channel isn’t just generating sales, but profits too.
By mastering the 3 C’s framework—create, capture, and convert—you can streamline your off-premise operations, drive more traffic, increase orders, and ultimately boost your profitability.
How Chowly Helps:
Your Off Premise Platform
Chowly is an essential tool for modern restaurants, streamlining off-premise operations to boost efficiency and profitability. With over 17,000 restaurants in the United States using Chowly, this platform has proven to be a game-changer in the industry, powering digital ordering, marketing, and integration.
By leveraging Chowly, restaurants can streamline their Off Premise operations, ensuring efficient order management, improved customer experience, and increased profitability. Whether it’s creating demand, capturing orders, or converting them into repeat business, Chowly is the platform that supports every step of the journey.
Chowly has been pushing the envelope by consistently bringing first-to-market product innovations to the restaurant space. Whether it be the first to integrate Grubhub orders, bring enterprise-grade ordering to SMBs, or now tying online orders directly to paid ads for SMBs in one platform, Chowly will always keep your restaurant on the forefront of restaurant technology.
Chowly’s core functions revolve around creating, capturing, and converting demand into profits.
Under creating demand: Chowly manages Google and Meta paid ads, writes and schedules organic social posts, monitors reviews/ratings, and ensures accurate listings management all from 1 platform. These tools drive traffic via an improved digital presence.
Under capturing demand, Chowly provides a direct first-party online ordering platform. This commission-free platform is customized to each brand and automatically upsells commonly paired together items increasing basket sizes. Chowly also helps restaurants capture demand via third-party marketplace integrations. Leveraging the demand from the likes of DoorDash, Uber Eats, and many more, Chowly captures that demand and integrates directly into your POS.
Under conversion, everything runs on Chowly’s best-in-class POS integration so this demand is converted into something the kitchen can easily execute. Additionally, convert those third-party orders into real profits with Chowly’s smart pricing tool that dynamically adjusts prices for higher demand to ultimately drive more dollars to your restaurant’s bottom line.
Chowly ensures your POS is truly supported with features that matter. It supports nested mods, allowing for complex, customized orders, and offers fast processing to keep up with the pace of your business. The platform provides live 86ing for real-time inventory management and accommodates multiple payment types for flexibility. Detailed tracking is also available to monitor orders and performance, ensuring every aspect of the restaurant’s operations is covered.
By leveraging Chowly, restaurants can streamline their off-premise operations, ensuring efficient order management, improved customer experience, and increased profitability. Whether it’s creating demand, capturing orders, or converting them into repeat business, Chowly is the platform that supports every step of the journey.
Maximizing Return on Time
Return on Time (ROT) is essential for SMBs in the restaurant industry. While large enterprises may prioritize return on investment (ROI), SMBs must focus on maximizing their limited time. Restaurant operators often juggle multiple tasks, making time their most valuable resource.
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One common challenge is that many operators hit a wall around three locations, where managing everything themselves becomes unsustainable. Just because they can perform a task doesn’t mean they should. For example, asking a Michelin-star chef to write a piano song is impractical, even though they might be creative enough to do it. Their time is better spent on activities that directly benefit the restaurant.
By offloading routine responsibilities to technology companies that can automate these tasks, operators can focus on high-impact projects. Keeping menus, online listings, and social media profiles updated is essential, but these tasks can be 95% automated with the right technology. This not only saves time but also enhances customer perception, engagement, and profitability.
Working on the business rather than in the business is crucial for growth. Many restaurateurs struggle to find this balance, often getting bogged down in daily operations. Technology can bridge this gap by handling routine tasks, allowing operators to concentrate on strategic expansion and innovation.
Investing time wisely in digital presence maintenance boosts visibility, improves customer satisfaction, and ensures long-term success. Automating tasks like updating Google hours, maintaining accurate menus, and posting on social media regularly frees up operators to focus on providing excellent food and customer service. In essence, technology boosts efficiency, enabling restaurants to streamline operations and giving operators more time to prioritize exceptional food and service.
Conclusion
Chowly is an off-premise platform that empowers restaurants to create, capture, and convert demand into sustainable profits. We start by creating demand with robust digital marketing strategies, utilizing platforms like Meta and Google, and comprehensive listings management. We then capture this demand with a customized, high-converting online ordering site that maximizes every customer interaction to a potential sale. Finally, we convert this demand into profitable sales, seamlessly integrating with your existing POS System to boost efficiency and profitability. With Chowly, restaurants can streamline their digital and off-premise operations, boost their digital presence, and maximize their profitability.
