There’s a lot that goes into running a successful restaurant—coming up with a great menu, providing outstanding hospitality, and coaching your staff, to name a few. Unfortunately, some of the most important tasks aren’t as engaging as those and can be incredibly time-consuming. In this article, we’ll show you how technology can serve as an extension of your team—working 24/7, 365 and empowering you to get back to what you love.

Phone answering

Employing an experienced team at your restaurant can be expensive, so you’ll want to make sure your staff are focused on high-priority tasks to maximize their impact. While answering the phone is incredibly important, not every phone call is. That’s why many restaurants are using artificial intelligence to help field incoming calls.

AI-powered phone answering listens to guests’ questions and uses keywords to identify answers from a restaurant’s website and Google Business Profile. For example, if a guest asks “What hours are you open?”, the AI will identify “hours” and respond with the proper information. This keeps restaurant staff from wasting time answering simple questions. Of course, if there is a more complex request, the AI will direct the customer’s call to the restaurant to speak with one of your staff. This guarantees that any call your team does answer is well worth their time. 

Burrito Gallery implemented Popmenu AI Answering for their four locations in Jacksonville, Florida. As a result they were able to service over 29,800 customers over the phone while saving their staff over 260 hours. “That’s 260 hours that we’ve had someone doing something more impactful for the business than answering the phone and saying ‘yes, we’re open until ten o’clock.’” share VP of Operations, Martin Bekkedal “[Answering] allows you to be more efficient, effective, and listen to what the guest wants.”

Third-party order aggregation

Doordash, Uber Eats, Grub Hub—the list of third-party online ordering platforms is lengthy. While it’s beneficial to have your restaurant on them in some cases, having individual tablets to manage each one can quickly become overwhelming. This can easily lead to slow order acceptance rates and errors when orders are put int o your POS. Fortunately, third-party order aggregators can resolve these problems and more.

Tools, like OrderNerd, remove the headache of order management by bringing all of the third-party marketplaces into one app. They automatically accept and print orders while injecting them into specific POS systems, removing the human error that can come with balancing so many platforms. Finally, third-party order aggregators can generate a single sales report, creating better insight into revenue from online ordering and making it easier to balance the books. 

Website

Managing a website that ranks at the top of Google search pages can be difficult, especially with how rapidly SEO trends change. Fortunately, there are a few fundamentals restaurants can take advantage of and it starts in the unlikliest of places—your online menu.

In order for your website to climb the rankings, it needs to provide accurate answers to guest inquiries and update consistently to prove it has relevant content. That’s where dynamic menus come in. These menus turn every dish into it’s own url, so your website takes up more digital real estate and guests can find specific dishes pages if they know exactly what they’re craving. Additionally, they showcase customer reviews and likes, both of which count as website update anytime a new one is added. It’s a great way to help website performance without additional work from you!

Tom Voskuil, Co-owner of Taqueria Picoso, finds that owning customer reviews on his dynamic menu makes it easier to control the narrative guests see about his restaurant. “They dynamic menus is great—it’s immediate feedback with someone dining at the restaurant. If the review is positive, great; if not, we can immediately address it.”

Email marketing

In order to get the most from your marketing efforts, it’s important to send personalized, perfectly-timed messages to your guests. Finding the time or the talent to do that consistently, however, proves to be a challenge. That’s where email marketing technology can help!

Many email tools for restaurants can collect customer data and use it to automatically send personalized emails. That means your restaurant can wish guests a happy birthday or invite them to leave a review after placing an online order without lifting a finger. The best part is, these emails are effective ways to drive online sales for your business.

Ocean State Sandwich Company’s Owner, Eric Handwerger, is the restaurant’s sole marketer (among a million other jobs he does for his business). He single-handedly earned over $29,000 in online sales thanks to automated emails. As a result, he has more time to prep his restaurant before the day starts and get creative with his offerings.

Social media

The key to successful social media strategy is consistency, but coming up with ideas, content, and captions everyday can often feel impossible. That’s why many owners and operators are using artificial intelligence to help with their content creation.

AI can identify top-selling items, upcoming events, and recent reviews so your restaurant always has access to engaging content at the press of the button. Some tools are even able to draft social calendar’s a month at a time. For busy restaurant owners, this means less time brainstorming ideas and writing captions, and more time focusing on tasks that require a more human touch.

Restaurant technology built to save you time

While all of the technology mentioned above is available as point solutions, Popmenu is the only restaurant platform that includes them all. We know your time is valuable, so we built technology that works for you, so you can focus on doing what you love. 

Interested in how Popmenu can help your restaurant automate time-consuming tasks? Schedule a demo with one of our experts to learn more.