How to deliver the best omnichannel customer experience

Do your customers 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. Desert QSR chain Crepeaffaire reported a massive 49.5% rise in ATV attributed to the range of digital channels it delivers to guests. 

But ensuring guests have a consistent, branded experience across multiple ordering channels is certainly not an easy feat. And if you’re working across multiple platforms and point solution providers? 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 self-ordering 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.

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 provided 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 an operation made up of fragmented point solutions all revolving around the POS.

With your operation depending on multiple providers to hold your collection of order channels together, the reality of a consistent omnichannel experience becomes more complex.

Customer journey

Each separate tech provider will have individual nuances and differences in their setup. These will be reflected in the customer’s journey when changing between each order channel.

Some providers may allow branding customisation across the customer journey, whereas others won’t. This creates more inconsistency across your order channels and impacts brand affinity.

Loyalty

It’s also very difficult to launch and maintain a loyalty scheme that works across multiple channels when these are delivered by separate point solutions.

Instead, the loyalty process is often divided into 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 omnichannel customer experience right

Working with a fragmented tech stack means you can only deliver a fragmented customer journey.

A simple solution can be the most effective way to provide customers with a truly consistent experience across your operation.

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.