A mobile app can be a big part of your marketing strategy, but it can also be expensive and time-consuming. It’s important to get it right so that you can communicate with your customers and offer them a better experience.
Here are five important factors to consider when building a mobile app for your restaurant. The list isn’t exhaustive, but from our experience working with restaurant owners and managers, it covers most bases.
1. Quality of Your App
No one wants to present their customers with something low-quality. Successful restaurants are proud of the quality of their food and service. Why would you ruin that with a low-quality app?
The issue is that quality is subjective. What I might call high quality might be mediocre to someone else. And vice-versa. Luckily, mobile apps collect feedback from the people using the app; your customers. App ratings in app stores are a measurable way of assessing the quality of an app.
2. Time to Launch the App
When evaluating options for building your mobile app, consider how long it will take for it to be in your customer’s hands. How long it will be between deciding to build an app, to the first time your customer places an order through that app?
That time frame is important because, during the build, you’re spending money but not yet making it back. The faster you can get your app launched, the faster you reap the fruits of your investment through customer loyalty, increased revenue, and streamlined processes.
3. How Much of Your Time it Will Take
As a restaurant owner or manager, your time is very valuable. There’s a lot that needs your attention, and tasks competing for your time. You need to consider how much time and effort you need to invest into building your app. Think of this as your opportunity cost.
How much time will it take to make design decisions, approve prototypes, test versions, and release and market the app.
4. Amount of Maintenance
Building your app is one thing, but maintaining that app is another. Once your app is released, you need to regularly review it for bugs. Those bugs will need to be fixed, and you will also need to make changes and introduce features requested by your customers. You also need to update your app each time a new version of the iOS or Android operating system are released. And that can happen quite frequently.
The maintenance costs over a few years often exceed the initial cost of building the app, so don’t overlook it as it could cost you a lot.
5. Price
This list wouldn’t be complete if we didn’t include price. By price, I mean the initial cost of building the app.
Be careful of considering price before the other factors mentioned above, as they are each equally important. It may be cheap to build the app but have high maintenance costs down the road, or be low-quality and end up costing you customers.
At the end of the day, deciding how and who will build your app is a business decision. It’s a factor of how much you spend versus how much you gain. Choosing the right provider for your restaurant’s mobile app will make a big difference in your return on investment in the long run.
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