Online reservations, customer reviews, marketing and an interactive social media presence are some of the more apparent signs of technology that have pervaded the foodservice and restaurant business.
Technology is a pre-requisite to addressing the modern customer’s service and experience expectations. The right restaurant management software can add markedly to business efficiency, and help align the enterprise operations optimally, and in its entirety.
The term ‘Experience Economy’ may be more habitually associated with the retail business, but it is just as pertinent to the foodservice and restaurant industry. Much like retail, a successful restaurant builds its reputation by adhering to high quality in service and product, consistently and over a sustained period. It takes very few and infrequent shortcomings to create an adverse impact on a restaurant business and its reputation. Technology is, therefore, an invaluable resource to ensure that such a negative impact is avoided.
From the kitchen to the floor, the reception to the manager’s cabin, technology can create an impact that redefines the entire value-chain and the roles of all stakeholders within a restaurant operation. The impact of the breathtaking pace at which digital technologies are emerging is no less apparent within this sector. New digital solutions are constantly empowering more responsive and profitable restaurant operations.
Restaurants have to work even harder than was the case in the past, to stand apart as a brand. For technology to contribute to success in such an environment, it needs to help the business become more agile and open to incorporating new trends, as market forces and customer preferences evolve.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 is a highly versatile tool, across sectors, and is particularly compatible with the service industry. It can act as a thoroughly comprehensive solution for a restaurant business, which can be fine-tuned to address the needs of a specific operation, to a very exacting degree. By integrating CRM, ERP and cloud technology – as well as other features – Dynamics 365 offers the advantages of multi-platform and multi-channel access, agile process and resource management, as well as enhanced customer engagement.
Technology as an Enabler: Challenges and Solutions
Finding a software solution that is the perfect fit for your restaurant business requires a clear-minded assessment of the challenges that you face and identifying the impact that the application can have on that metric. The process of achieving this requires a very specific correlation of requirements to capability, as well as considering what unprecedented capacities might enhance your business model. While the scope for such a discussion is fairly vast, here are some important challenges that restaurant businesses typically face, along with possible tech-driven solutions:
- Online ordering and payments: Ease of ordering as well as being agnostic to payment methods, using online options, is crucial for a modern restaurant operation. Any software platform that a food service business uses as its mainstay needs to be compatible with existing options, as well as having the leeway to incorporate future innovations.
- Reservations, loyalty programs and feedback management: Personalized customer-facing facilities are a prerequisite for surviving a competitive business. A well-designed and flexible software platform should be able to maintain such records dependably and using a highly customizable interface that is easy to use.
- Reporting and analytics: As with any other business, better and more empowered management produces immediately discernible positives for the restaurant business as well. An ideal digital platform needs to have the ability to incorporate, analyze and display information on an ongoing and real-time basis, using dashboards that are easy to interpret.
- Employee management: The ability to incorporate diverse taxation, salary, training, shift allocation and superannuation requirements is crucial in the restaurant business because employees routinely range from permanent to casual. Your software of choice needs to reflect this range of requirements.
- Inventory and purchasing: A restaurant business needs to have extremely fine control over its inventory, to realize its maximum potential. This is particularly critical because of the large number of perishables involved, as well as the highly specific ingredients and resources that add to the quality. For software to address a food service business adequately, it needs to have the ability to meet this requirement consistently and without fail.
Conclusion
The restaurant business requires a high degree of dependable performance and adherence to the highest standards of quality possible. Digital technology provides the ideal support for such systems, which have a low tolerance for error and also need to address interactive and effective customer engagement. With consistency and quality at a premium, the restaurant industry is ideally suited for the enhancements that digital transformation can enable.
To understand how Dynamics 365 can help your restaurant business perform to its optimum potential, please reach out to us at sales.uae@intwo.cloud
