Discover the trick to delivering a consistent omnichannel guest experience and loyalty scheme across all your order channels.
Do your guests interact with your brand outside the four walls of your restaurant?
In this age of digital ordering, they almost certainly do.
This interaction can be crucial to your restaurant’s growth. High street coffee chain Pret a Manger recently reported a 20% rise in sales during the first half of 2023. This was attributed to the success of their fully branded, digital subscription scheme.
But ensuring guests have a consistent experience across multiple ordering channels is certainly not an easy feat. Making sure that experience stays true to your brand as well? Next to impossible.
Think fragmented customer journeys, inconsistent branding and disconnected loyalty schemes. It can be difficult (and time-consuming) to keep everything connected to the singular vision you have for your brand.
There is a more seamless way, though.
Discover the trick to getting omnichannel guest experience right (without sacrificing your brand or sinking hours of work) in our guide below…
What does omnichannel mean in the restaurant industry?
Guests expect to interact with your restaurant brand across multiple channels. From in-store ordering via the POS or kiosks, to digital channels like Click & Collect and loyalty schemes.
Having an omnichannel strategy ensures this interaction and customer journey feels consistent at every touch point, no matter the order channel.
The benefits of an omnichannel strategy
Branding and customer journey
Your unique branding and character sets your restaurant apart. Making sure this is reflected across your range of ordering channels is essential to growing your brand outside your physical locations.
Having a consistent customer journey means guests don’t have to grapple with learning multiple processes whenever they order via a new channel. This makes all your ordering channels feel integrated in the same ecosystem of your brand. It also encourages quick adoption of new digital channels if and when these are launched.
Making sure the brand they love is featured in familiar ways across these channels is also a great way to boost affinity with your operation. It promotes an engaging relationship outside of the transaction in-store.
Omnichannel loyalty schemes
As the cost of eating out continues to rise for guests, loyalty schemes are becoming increasingly significant for operators to stand out against the competition. According to IGD, 39% of eating out loyalty users say that loyalty schemes influence where they buy food and drink.
With so many ordering channels available, the days of paper stamp cards are long gone. Customers now expect digital loyalty schemes that earn them points across all channels towards a singular reward.
Why is it so hard to get omnichannel experience right?
In theory, omnichannel strategy sounds easy: just make sure your branding, customer journey and loyalty scheme are consistent across your operation.
In practice, things aren’t nearly so simple.
Restaurant tech innovation introduced multiple ordering channels to operators. This expanded their digital presence and providing customers with new ways to interact with the brands they love.
The problem for operators is that these order channels are often launched via separate point solutions bolted onto an existing, POS-centric tech stack.
This creates a ‘Frankentech stack’ made up of a complex, fragmented web of point solutions all revolving around the POS.
With your operation depending on multiple providers to hold together your collection of order channels, the reality of a consistent omnichannel strategy becomes more complex.
Customer journey
Each separate tech provider will have individual nuances and differences in their setup. These will be reflected for the customer in the customer journey changing between each order channel.
Some providers may allow for customisation of branding across the customer journey, whereas others won’t. This creates more inconsistency across your order channels and impacting brand affinity.
Loyalty
It’s also very difficult to launch and maintain a loyalty scheme that works across multiple channels when these are provided by separate point solutions.
Instead, the loyalty process is often split up into separate journeys between digital order channels and in-store orders. Customers work towards separate rewards with no crossover between channels.
This makes it difficult to engage customers in your loyalty scheme or create excitement around the rewards process.
The trick to getting it omnichannel guest experience right
Working with a fragmented tech stack means you can only deliver a fragmented customer journey.
To provide customers with a truly consistent experience across your operation, a simple solution can be the most effective.
Moving away from a POS-centric, point solution-based tech stack and embracing one system to manage all order channels unlocks a much easier avenue to delivering this omnichannel experience.
A single order management system equips operators to take and fulfil 100% of orders from every channel, all in the same place.
With one tech provider, the process of managing and updating these order channels takes far less time and provides the same customisation across channels. This gives operators much more control over the way their order channels look, feel and behave.
Customers can learn the order journey from one channel and easily apply this to another, with the same branding, order steps and design across your operation.
An integrated, consistent loyalty programme can be easily rolled out across every channel. Customers will earn points on kiosks and Click & Collect – for example – and work towards the same reward scheme on both.
And when you’re launching that new order channel? Forget sinking hours of complex work into trying to match the rest. With a single system managing all your points of purchase, new channels can be launched quickly with the same branding as all the others.
Want to see omnichannel digital ordering in action?
Join the waitlist for a one-on-one guided tour with a restaurant expert to explore how our most innovative clients are using technology to deliver omnichannel guest experience and loyalty scheme,.
This bespoke site safari includes a personal strategy session to plan growth opportunities for your brand.
