Since early 2020, businesses worldwide have been struggling to cope with the effects of the coronavirus pandemic, and the restaurant industry is no exception. For many restaurateurs, this meant adjusting and changing their everyday business operations to generate new revenue and help their staff and customers feel safer. For some, adjusting has not been as easy leading to temporary and in some cases permanent closures.
Restaurateurs, faced with the same challenges as last year, are seeking to remain as profitable as possible in an industry that may need to re-invent itself once in-person dining returns. Successful restaurateurs are uncovering new and inventive ways to wait out the storm, such as utilizing innovative technology-based solutions.
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The Challenge
With restrictions on indoor dining, many restaurants have leaned on outdoor dining, drive-thru, and online ordering service. However, businesses without a patio, drive-thru window, or an online ordering system found themselves unable to compete. Because of this, they turned to online ordering and curbside pickup services. Traditionally, curbside pickup staff would approach cars in the parking lot to take orders, process payments, and then hand-deliver the food to the car when it was ready. Customers who opted to order ahead of time would call the restaurant’s landline and show up curbside to collect their order.
While these methods are great in concept and may have sufficed pre-pandemic, they are not holding up today. Staff taking orders and processing transactions from window to window are risking their own health as well as the health of everyone else in the curbside pickup queue. Additionally, suppose customers place a curbside order and call again when they arrive. In that case, the restaurant will quickly become flooded with calls and leave customers waiting with a busy dial tone. No one wants their customers and staff frustrated.
The Solution
Restaurateurs continue to be nimble and creative by searching for solutions that cater to the current environment by turning to solutions like UBMe. A social, mobile tech company, UBMe uses patented communication technology to help businesses better connect to, transact with, and understand their customers. UBMe offers a free app that allows local users to discover and interact with businesses such as restaurants.
The app gives restaurateurs the ability to remotely communicate with customers via live chat for curbside pickup services. This not only cuts down on communication frustration, it also cuts down unnecessary contact between staff and customers, making the interaction safer for everyone. Customers simply need to download the app and stay inside their car while making or picking up a curbside order.
Paired with a Star Micronics printer, the most efficient printer capable of printing orders that come through UBMe’s platform, orders placed via the app will be printed automatically for immediate preparation. Starting with a 30-day free trial and one-time fee to purchase a printer from Star, restaurateurs can discover for themselves the benefits of implementing UBMe’s technology. After the free trial, restaurateurs are charged a flat 5% commission on each order from the app to cover the subscription cost. Restaurant owners can also pass this cost down to their customers with a small upcharge per order and use the UBMe platform for free.
