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For restaurant chains and single-store cafes alike, we’ve noticed that digital table ordering has been a massive help to hospitality businesses. Here’s where we break down why, and how you can do it too.
Let’s take a look at Belles Hot Chicken and Alcove Café & Deli, two very different venues that have come leaps and bounds since enabling Table Ordering with Bopple earlier this year.
Belles Hot Chicken is a restaurant chain with 6 stores across Victoria & New South Wales, and a massive following of customers who adore their food and brand. Alcove Café and Deli is a down-to-earth Queensland café, serving a smaller but no less loving customer base from their single store. Both venues activated digital Table Ordering in mid-2020, and both are among our top venues in terms of revenue increase, service, and order volume.
They’re not alone, either — similar improvements are noticeable across the 100+ venues that prioritised table ordering this year.
So — why do we know table ordering played a big part in these venues’ successes, and how exactly did focusing on the digitisation of in-venue ordering help? Let’s dig in.
Prioritising People
There’s no argument that the intangibles in hospitality are important — making customers and staff feel empowered can have long-term positive effects for all venues.
Speaking to the leadership teams at both Belles Hot Chicken Fitzroy and Alcove Café & Deli confirmed that the greatest benefit of Table Ordering has been improving these processes, resulting with these benefits:
😋 More satisfied customers— With the team not having to take orders directly, the risk of not taking the order correctly has been “completely eliminated,” and staff have been freed up enough to be able to go above and beyond with their service.
🍽️ Empowering customers to order themselves — At both stores, customers have been adding extra to their meals and ordering a second or third time without getting up. In the words of the owners at Alcove Café & Deli, that’s “more revenue, but not in a pushy sales way.”
🚶♀️Reducing foot traffic — With less customers getting up to order at the counter, there’s more space and less loitering on the restaurant floor. This means that the team “focus more on quality and speed of drink service, not on simply taking orders. ”
⚠️Making people feel safe — No physical menus and fewer physical touch-points allow both customers and staff to feel safe and more easily practice social distancing.
“More revenue, but not in a pushy sales way.”
— Alcove Cafe & Deli
Running the Numbers
The qualitative things are important, but we’re no strangers to the importance of metrics when operating a hospitality business. We ran the numbers on the venues that have enabled table ordering and their performance 30 days before, vs 30 days after doing so.
Here are the two major improvements we’ve seen with both venues in this case study coming out on top:
- Monthly revenue increase — Belles Hot Chicken Fitzroy and Alcove Café & Deli experienced an increase of 56% and 208% in revenue respectfully between the 30 day periods prior to and after activating table ordering in mid-2020. Some venues increased their monthly revenue by up to 5x after enabling the feature.
- Average order price increase — Alcove Café & Deli had an 85% average increase in average revenue per order and has roughly a third of their orders being processed through table ordering. We found that on average, venues with more than half of their orders being processed through table orders bring in 34% more revenue per orders than those who haven’t activated it.
Both of these improvements could realistically be attributed to customers ordering more in one sitting, and are also likely related to the qualitative benefits talked about in the previous section!
We also found that on average, venues with more than half of their orders being processed through table orders bring in 34% more revenue per orders than those who haven’t activated it.
How we can technology help? 👋
Bopple's table ordering feature ready to go for your business, and we’re happy to work with your venue to help you efficiently generate success in the same way as these two venues.
If you need help with anything from printing your first round of Table Ordering materials, to tracking your progress effectively, we’re here to help.