While customer expectations have soared across the entire spectrum of business activity recently, there is one industry that has always been judged through the lens of very particular tastes and preferences.
The restaurant business has long been accustomed to adhere to an exacting standard, in addressing every last detail, in its services and products. Of course, this makes the expectations the industry has to rise to even more demanding, in the age of the empowered customer. Fortunately, the restaurant business is also a great candidate for the intervention of digital technology. The right restaurant management software can add markedly to business efficiency, and help create impeccable customer experiences.
A great restaurant management software needs to handle many more outcomes and aspects than first presumptions might bring to mind. Whether at a quick-service eatery or a fine-dining venue, the spectrum of needs, and the collection of tools required to address them, is by no means trivial. The average restaurant, café or bistro requires an effective POS (Point of Sale) system at its core, but it also requires tools that manage online promotion, multi-channel bookings and orders, accounting and billing, procurement and inventory, shift allocation and employee management, special offers and loyalty programs, inbound as well as outgoing emails and phone calls, as well as measuring performance and enabling suitable analytics – at a minimum. Even if a restaurant management software doesn’t address every one of these systemic requirements, it should – in the very least – be able to integrate with every one of these functions, and more. Clearly, choosing the right software for your restaurant business can make a significant difference. Which is why, establishing a process that identifies the best choice for your particular business is crucial.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 provides the food service and restaurant industry with a comprehensive ‘end-to-end’ solution that is fully customizable to their needs and current operational model. The solution enhances food service businesses through integrated CRM and ERP and cloud technology that leverages multi-platform and multi-channel access, to enable agile management and enhanced customer engagement.
Integrated, Comprehensive and Future-Ready
In considering the ideal software for your restaurant business, the business needs to prioritize its most critical outcomes and measure the performance of the solution accordingly. While this requires a very specific mapping of needs versus performance, for each individual business, here are some important metrics and characteristics to bear in mind:
- User-Friendly Interface – Having listed the complex needs that a restaurant business needs to optimize, it should be obvious that badly designed software can slow, rather than enhance operations. Interface design is a crucial aspect of the software that needs to reconcile functional robustness with ease of use.
- Ease-of-Order Customization – Personalized orders are a prerequisite for a restaurant that meets customer needs well. Of course, as any restaurateur will tell you, orders often need to be altered and customers change their mind often. Ensure that your restaurant management software is flexible enough to meet these needs.
- Integrated with all available modes of payment – From a diverse range of debit and credit cards, to gift cards and e-wallets, the modern restaurant business needs to be able to accept payments across the entire gamut of choices that customers now have available.
- Employee management – The typical restaurant business deals with the entire range of employees, from permanent to casual and highly specialized to generic. This inherently presents the challenge of having to include several different kinds of taxation, salary and superannuation modes. In addition to tracking shifts and productivity, with exact and dependable records, several tertiary functions – such as training and user access – need to be managed without error. For day to day functions, this is one of the most important facets on which to subject the solution of your choice to assessment.
- Future-readiness – As much as many restaurant businesses tend to see their enduring charm and time tested core strengths as their strong suit, the fact of the matter is that the world is changing, and rapidly. From chatbots to website interactivity, app functionality to cloud-based backend services, the technologies becoming available can be intimidating for those with an entirely different field of expertise. Nevertheless, it’s crucial that the solution that your business ultimately chooses is assessed on all these counts, as well as other emerging technologies.
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.
