Given the rise in average disposable income, money being splurged on food from restaurants has gone up, however, surprisingly, a bigger chunk of that expense is spent on taking out and delivery orders instead of on sit-in orders. The reason is not only price but also convenience. People like the comfort of being able to get the food delivered to their homes or offices.
Managing a restaurant business in today’s cut-throat competition is not an easy feat. It is compounded by the massive growth of third-party delivery services and corresponding online orders for which restaurants have to pay a hefty commission. To compete with them, restaurants have no choice but to offer their customers a convenient and streamlined option to place to direct delivery orders.
This paradigm shift has led to the advent of various call center outsourcing business models that are supporting the restaurant business from the backend. To provide customers with secure service consistently and cost-effectively, restaurants extensively use customer support outsourcing solutions for restaurants. The objective here is to keep up with the rising labour costs, meeting customer service expectations, robust growth in the industry, and most importantly, the inflation in the food prices.
Say Yes to Customer Support Outsourcing Solutions if you want to
1. Improve Customer Experience for Dine-in Customers
During peak times, handling order taking on the phone and attending to dine-in customers at the restaurants can be quite a daunting task. Unless you have dedicated staff just to attend to phone orders, which is almost never the case, either you will keep the dine-in customer waiting for service or will leave the phone unattended. Juggling the two tasks simultaneously often results in unprofessional experience for your customers, both dine-in and call-in ones and the poor experience drives them away to the next best option. Not only that, you may not even realise how much revenue you may be missing in the form of lost orders due to missed or poorly handled calls.
This problem can quickly be resolved by deploying Outsourced Call Center Services; so that the restaurant staff can focus on the more pressing issue at hand, i.e., serving yummy food on time without being constantly distracted by a constantly ringing phone.
2. Improve Order Taking and Mitigate Errors
When your staff takes orders inside the restaurant at the host station or bar, straining to hear the order details from the customer on the phone, it is quite probable that they will make mistakes in taking down the order, leading to not only a dissatisfied customer but revenue loss and bad reputation that can spread like fire, thanks to social media and review websites. The loss can take gigantic proportions if it is a complex catering order, which can sometimes run into thousands of dollars.
Working in a quiet, professional set-up, customer support outsourcing solutions agents are well trained to note down the order details with flawless precision and pass on the right order details to the restaurants. Before call center outsourcing agents start taking the calls, they are made to go through rigorous training to familiarise them with each location’s menu, food USP etc. to ensure great customer experience, something that most restaurants can’t do, given the limited bandwidth and resources accompanied by staffing challenges.
3. Maximize Revenues
With polished vocabulary and professional conversing etiquettes, the call center agents employed by customer support outsourcing solutions take the extra initiative to ensure a friendly interaction with customers. They give educated answers about menu items and guide the buyers on add-on products that complement their order to skilfully upsell and cross sell, with the customer’s consent of-course. It is observed that having customer support outsourcing solutions on board not only leads to an increase in total order volume but also average order size easily goes up 10-15%.
4. Minimize Expenses
As a restaurant, if you were to hire, train and maintain the same calibre of phone order taking call center agents internally, you are talking about a considerable investment in terms of money, resources and time. You can eliminate this entire expense and overheads if you instead take advantage of customer support outsourcing solutions. You also cut significant cost not in reduced labour cost but also lesser footprint in your store layout that you would have otherwise allocated to accommodate phone order taking agents. Given that most restaurants are opened in popular areas where the cost of real estate is high, gains in cost savings by call center outsourcing are hard to ignore. Above all, most of the call center outsourcing companies are flexible and can easily scale up or scale down according to your changing business requirements. A lot of call center outsourcing companies also offer Multilingual call center outsourcing solutions so if you require a French call center for your phone order taking along with an English call centre, it is feasible to hire one cost effectively.
5. Handling Customer Feedback Effectively
Responding to authentic feedbacks also play a pivotal role in enhancing the brand name. As such, restaurants need to pay special attention to the feedback received and adjust themselves as per the need of their clientele. Here too, customer support outsourcing solutions demonstrate an active role in handling and managing the feedbacks at the real time. Positive comments are instantly shared with the followers, and negative comments are acted upon at the very instant. This gives the restaurant brand to actually understand the grey areas that they need to work upon along with knowing the key highlights of their services.
6. Improve your Brand perception
Often, restaurants are apprehensive about using customer support outsourcing solutions but as a matter of fact, these call center outsourcing professionals are hired following stringent recruitment tests and are made to go through regular training to be the face of the brand. They are trained to mimic your mannerism and culture. Since call center outsourcing agents are not multitasking like your in-house staff, they are only focused on providing an excellent experience to your customers on each phone interaction. Your customers appreciate being able to promptly talk to a knowledgeable outsourced customer support agent who is wholly attentive to their queries and assists them professionally through the order taking process without interrupting the conversation or putting them on hold to attend to another task. Needless to say, your brand value goes up in the eyes of your customers, not only making them loyal to your brand but also your brand advocates.
7. Streamline Your Phone Order Taking
Phone order taking complexity goes several times up if your restaurant has multiple locations. Not only it is a challenge to provide consistent customer experience across different locations, but it is also a hassle for the customer as often times they end up dialling a wrong location and need to be directed to the correct one. With customer support outsourcing solutions on board on board, such issues are eradicated. Calls from different locations can be routed to the same team of call center outsourcing company so that your customers get the same level of friendly and professional service irrespective of which location they call at. Call center outsourcing agents enter the order into your POS and KDS systems for the relevant location accurately and use the system of your choice.
We at LiveSalesman, offer high-quality phone order taking services for restaurants in both English and 30 other European and Asian languages. Talk to us today to find more.
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