The government’s call for social distancing (or physical distancing) has been implemented since March. This of course resulted in a significant decline in productivity of so many businesses, including restaurants. No more dining in at restaurants and many outlets have been temporarily closed to slow the spread of the coronavirus. So, how can a restaurant’s sales management system be continuously improved?
How You Can Increase Your Restaurant Sales During the Covid-19 Crisis
Yes, you read that correctly. You can still boost your restaurant sales during the coronavirus outbreak. The pandemic may have caused many businesses to lose their profits, but this does not mean that yours must go through the same thing. Many people are still relying on restaurants for their daily meals since not everyone can or want to make their own meals. Here are five ways you can implement to increase your restaurant sales during a crisis!
1. Improve the Presentation of Your Food Takeaways and Deliveries
Now it’s time for restaurant owners to focus on takeaway and delivery services. You can still improve the customer experience through your takeaways and deliveries. Firstly, your *takeaway food presentation needs to be improved. This will make a good impression on customers. You can also make use of the great presentation for Instagram competitions.
Secondly, show your concern for customers’ health by giving them greeting cards or beautiful notes on their food boxes. Expressing your gratitude to your customers for their loyalty to your restaurant during this difficult situation or writing a note that reminds them to wash their hands before enjoying the food will leave a special memory for them.
Thirdly, improve the way you serve your restaurant orders so that you are able to fulfill more customer orders every day. This can be effortlessly done if your restaurant has a kitchen display system (KDS). The system enables chefs to easily see incoming orders, set priorities for food preparation, determine the estimated time of serving and many more.
Last but not least, make it easier for your customers to find your restaurant. If your restaurant doesn’t have its own website, try to be reachable via Instagram. Allow your customers to order via WhatsApp and telephone. Be more accessible by registering your restaurant on popular food delivery apps like Deliveroo, GrabFood, or FoodPanda.
* Note: In addition to enhancing your takeaway food presentation, the quality and cleanliness of your food must also be maintained. Make sure that you conduct regular inspections and provide guidelines for staff for maintaining personal hygiene.
2. Create Healthy Food Options for Customers
To show your concern for your customers’ health, consider adding new, healthier dishes to the menu. In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, people’s awareness of healthy food is increasing. So why not take advantage of this situation? Aside from helping increase your restaurant sales, this might also help you bring in new types of customers, such as vegetarians or those who are on special diets.
3. Manage Your Shift Employees Effectively
If you must keep your restaurant open, it is a must for you to impose shift schedules. This most likely requires you to increase the number of employees since employees’ working hours are reduced, but that is a consequence you must face.
Managing employee shift schedules manually on paper will be inconvenient. Use the right timesheet management system to make it easier to manage and monitor employee working hours with the timesheet application, as well as calculate wages by the hour.
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4. Optimize Food Inventory Management
Food inventory is one of the most important elements in restaurant management. You don’t want to lose customers due to stock shortages, but you certainly don’t want to deal with excess stock as well.
The best way to manage food inventory is to use a restaurant management app that enables you to streamline your inventory and procurement processes. HashMicro restaurant management app allows you to maintain food inventory across multiple outlets. You can monitor stock levels, handle stock requests and transfer stocks to outlets that run out of stocks, calculate the value of your stocks, and much more.
Make sure that you establish good communication with your supplier. EQUIP restaurant management app also facilitates procurement processes by allowing you to manage purchase requests from each outlet, track tenders and quotations online, reorder automatically, and so on. Hence, food supplies can always be maintained, waste can be avoided, and you are able to meet customer demand every single day.
5. Focus on Digital Marketing
As the physical distancing is still ongoing, you can take advantage of this current situation to improve your digital marketing. People spend more time at home relying on the internet. Therefore, posting your ads on social media and sending newsletters is one of the best ways you can do to increase your restaurant sales
Create interesting content on Instagram regularly. You can also use free ads, but using paid ads will greatly help your posts gain more exposure. Consider decorating your website with useful and readable content for readers. Send the blog articles to your customers, Instagram followers, and subscribers via email on a regular basis.
Conclusion
The restaurant business is very profitable during the pandemic because many people are starting to work from home and want snacks as work companions. As a result, if you want to start a business in the restaurant industry, you should focus more on the quality of your restaurant’s delivery and takeaway services.
Furthermore, the use of food ordering applications will be widespread, resulting in new issues such as the occurrence of double input menus in each application or service. You can avoid this by investing your profits in HashMicro’s Hash F&B Software. You can try our system for free with a demo system from Hashmicro
