Benefits of Contactless Ordering

Contactless ordering is the hospitality industry’s digital genie. Customers can swipe their magical phone, and out comes a fully functional, interactive menu—no touching used menus or waiting for servers to arrive at your table. Plus, contactless ordering grants your establishment three wishes of effortless operations, optimized safety, and maximized transactions. 

Once you experience the versatility of this new customer-ordering experience, you’ll never want to put this genie back in its bottle. 

Below, we’ll be covering a number of different contactless ordering tips and explain the business-changing benefits of shifting towards this restaurant technology.

#1 Streamlined Workflow

Contactless ordering provides your restaurant with a seamless and error-free dining experience that won’t sacrifice any of the personal connection traditionally associated with sit-down service.

• Reduced server errors – Digital food ordering reduces work volume for staff by limiting order errors during the transfer from pen to POS. Customers choose and order what they want, how they want it all from an online ordering system.

• Change orders with a touch – Often diners will forget to mention their aversion to garlic or their sensitivity to gluten. With quick, streamlined contactless ordering, your guests can change their order or request help at a touch of a button. Contactless ordering also offers the ability to create customized menus that allow guests to search and filter seamlessly for dining preferences and dietary restrictions.

• Serving Efficiency – As a server, you often find yourself stuck at a table taking orders when one guest hasn’t decided on their meal yet. This can have a snowball effect when the next table’s customers were waiting to order and growing impatient. Rather than focusing on getting everyone’s food to their tables on time, servers can instead focus on ensuring a quality customer experience. 

Little inefficiencies add up. By letting your guests start the dining experience with contactless ordering, you can offer guests more control, free up server bandwidth, and ensure a streamlined workflow from arrival to departure when moving towards a contactless dining experience.

What About Guests Who Want The Traditional Dining Experience?

New technological solutions don’t have to be all-or-none. Many guests prefer the sit-down service staples, embellished with waiter-approved recommendations, chummy repartee, and each of the personal touches traditionally served alongside their steaming plate of filet mignon. 

If that’s the case, it never hurts to have a few spare (sanitized) menus at the ready.

Remember: Contactless ordering optimizes, rather than sacrifices, the service experience. With more flexibility, waitstaff can dedicate themselves to what matters most—making your guests' dining experience one of excellence. 

#2 Serve From a Safe Distance

Contactless ordering is a customer-requested technology, one now demanded by COVID’s unforeseeable transformation of the way restaurant staff operate in the food service industry.

In addition to its service optimization, contactless ordering for restaurants improves the safety of all building occupants by allowing them to not only maintain a safe distance from each other, but eliminate the spread of pathogens through the use of a contactless menu. 

Taking orders and processing payments digitally also increases service speed, allowing your staff to turn around tables faster, boost revenue, and, most importantly, stay healthy. 

#3 Improved Guest Loyalty and Transactions

Contactless technology and the use of mobile devices within the service sphere offer ample opportunities to not only enhance guest loyalty but optimize transactions.

With the implementation of contactless ordering comes the supplementary adoption of advanced technologies that amplify customer service interactions. 

More specifically, the resurgence of the QR code platform, used to share online menu options and specials with in-restaurant guests, is a data encrypting magician—but its top hat is filled with a lot more than rabbits. Instead, its rim brims with pages of menu offerings, providing customers with shorter wait times and convenient re-access so diners can continue to scroll the online menu during their meal to order more treats for the table—who’s in the mood for dessert?

It’s the seamless convenience that’ll keep your customers coming back for more (and more and more). 

#4 Maximized Marketing

Inspired by the convenience and utility of digital ordering, restaurants around the country are adopting this digital genie as a means for forward-thinking brand revamps, with digital-only restaurants and dedicated food pick-ups for digital orders.¹ 

The revitalized restaurant designs burgeoning around the country indicate a high demand for digital ordering services, as well as digital loyalty programs.

The integration of technology into the hospitality industry improves guest experiences, sure. But it also gathers vital data and analytics that provide a greater understanding of customer preferences. 

This allows restaurants to create unique and personalized dining experiences. 

Contactless Ordering with GoTab

Contactless ordering provides your guests with an uncomplicated ordering experience available right at their fingertips. Digital menus offer vivid imagery and videos that immerse your guests into an innovative ordering experience. Plus, the benefits extend beyond your customers to your staff as well.

Here at GoTab, we understand the value of a contactless platform that encourages guests and servers to collaborate. A quick capture of a QR code initiates the ability to open tabs, browse menus, split bills, and add tips, too!

When it comes to payments, guests can input credit card information into an encrypted system or go contactless with GoTab’s mobile POS system. 

What’s more to say? With GoTab, your wish is granted. 

Sources: 

1. Fast Casual. Contactless ordering forcing restaurants to adopt 9 tech strategies in 2021. https://www.fastcasual.com/blogs/contactless-ordering-forcing-restaurants-to-adopt-9-tech-strategies-in-2021/