Why Your Restaurant Technologies Should Be Integrated

Technology plays an important part in a modern restaurant’s success. Many software companies have shifted their focus to the restaurant industry, and provide solutions that promise to improve everything, from customer experience to streamlining business operations.

Software like online ordering platforms, loyalty programs, delivery services, and Customer Relationship Management systems are contributing to the success of a restaurant, but need to talk to each other to work properly. In most cases, you need a central system that is integrated with each of these individual systems. Usually, a point of sale (POS) system is the central system. That means when selecting your POS, you need to consider whether or not you can easily integrate it with other systems.

Below are four of the most popular restaurant technologies used. Read on to learn why it’s important for them to integrate with your other technologies, especially your POS system.

Online Ordering

Online ordering allows restaurants to improve the customer experience and restaurant operations at the same time. Whether you offer online ordering on your website, a mobile app, or through a third-party platform, you need the ordering process to be seamless for your customers and staff. For that to happen, you need an online ordering tool that can integrate with your POS system.

If set up properly, orders will go from your online ordering app to your POS, with no manual re-entry by staff. Orders will appear in the same way as orders placed in-store.

When orders have to be manually re-entered by staff, there is the possibility of errors, and it is a time-consuming process—which costs you in labour.

Delivery Services

Companies like Uber Eats, and Doordash allow restaurants to offer delivery without having to hire staff to do it. It also gives restaurants more exposure to their customer base.

However, in most cases, to receive these orders you’re set up with a tablet for each of the delivery platforms. That means one tablet for Uber Eats, one for DoorDash, and one for whichever other platform you’re using. These tablets take up valuable counter space, and you have to pay someone to monitor and process the orders coming in from these platforms.

Luckily, there are software solutions that consolidate orders coming in and send them directly to your POS system.

Rewards & Loyalty Programs

Rewards and loyalty programs are great tools to engage customers and eventually turn them into loyal ones. But in order to get customers to sign up, it needs to be easy and convenient for them. 

Having a loyalty program integrated with your POS system and your online ordering site ensures your customers can collect, check and redeem points no matter how they order. It also allows you to keep track of rewards, discounts and free items given to your customers.

Customer Relation Management (CRM) Systems

Restaurant CRM systems allow you to organize the information you collect from your customers in one place. That info can be used for marketing campaigns or delivery information.

Restaurants collect information from customers when they receive online orders, orders for delivery, reservation requests, and when customers sign up for their loyalty program.

This information is extremely valuable for marketing. Many restaurants use it to stay in touch with their customers and to let them know about updates, specials, events, promotions and discounts. But it’s only useful if it isn’t adding more work for your team.

TO avoid re-entering data into your CRM manually, ensure your CRM is integrated with all your solutions, including your POS, your online ordering site, your mobile app, and anywhere else you collect customer information.

Stacking up solutions and hoping they improve your restaurant’s efficiency won’t work unless these solutions connect to each other. When choosing new technology solutions, consider how they’re going to work with the other solutions you’re already using.

We understand the importance of integration between technology solutions, so our priority has been to create a mobile app that can be integrated with other solutions. For a list of service providers that we integrate with, visit our integrations page.