Join the Discussion: Contactless Restaurant Ordering - How are your customers adapting?

[Helen]

We’re working with the Square for Restaurants team to better understand your needs as a restaurant or food business owner. And we’re sharing this post to start a discussion about how your customers are managing in the face of new changes.

Recently, many restaurants have changed their order flow to keep in line with social distance measures outlined by their territory or province. But change can be difficult and customers are navigating different ordering systems as businesses begin to reopen. How are your customers coping? 

Discussion questions: 

• What changes have you made to be accept orders at your restaurant? 
• How are your customers adapting to those changes? Have you changed your set up in light of customer feedback? 
• Are your customers happy that you’re now offering your menu online or that you’re taking orders over the phone? 

We’d love to hear how you and your restaurant customers are adapting to the new normal. Reply to this thread to join the conversation.

[Helen]

Tagging a few active sellers here to get your input: @PitMistress @Dwarf @lemondogs @EatMorePizza @PastaAndrew @DliciousTreats 

[EatMorePizza]

Hello @Helen ,

I own a small pizza carry out in Clintonville, Ohio in the US. I became the owner in at the beginning of June. Since we do not offer dine-in options my customers have already been "trained" to order online, call in, or order through a 3rd party delivery service. I really like the comments from @PitMistress about inventory management. I appreciate any functionality that can be packed into my square for restaurants subscription that I don't have to go to a third party to get.  

Being that we were carry-out and delivery only, my restaurant, and others like mine in the area weren't forced to shut down when all dining rooms were closed for business due to COVID. 

I still have the whole square kit in my dining room at home while I am testing and managed to find a bug in the team permissions functionality. I do not go to my restaurant every day so I want my team to be able to do only what they need to do. Other than that, the setup has been a straight forward and I am ready to put it in the store. 

I plan to enable online ordering through square (currently pay someone else to offer this service) and integrate with a few 3rd party delivery services. I am curious if this group has done the same and if it has been easy to implement?

Thanks,

Andrew

[Helen]

Thank you Andrew @EatMorePizza - I'm glad to hear you've been able to stay open and you didn't have to make too many changes to continue serving your customers. Have you noticed any changes in customer behavior? Have you had  more phone orders or do you mostly get online orders? Are you still busy at certain times of day? 

I hope someone here can share their experience with the Square Online Store!

(PS Thank you for reporting that bug!)

[Helen]

@PitMistress or @MattHebb1995 Any tips for setting up online ordering for @EatMorePizza?

[PitMistress]

@EatMorePizza this is actually Devynn's husband - she's busy smoking awesome food and doing the customer service thing, lol. She also set up and runs the website, so I can't give too much feedback on it, but it was pretty straightforward to set up from our end, from what I saw. I think the biggest thing we have had to do is to just play around with things. We create items, ring in transactions (as cash), visit the website, ask customers for feedback, etc. just to see what the customer perspective is and how it looks on our end. I think I mentioned in my other post that I we include a side with our sandwiches and meat. I hadn't found a good way to track what sides we were selling, so I ended up creating all of our sides as an option to try and track them better. It worked great for ordering in the restaurant and for actually seeing sales, but was a nightmare on the website end of things, because there was no way to say "OK website, I have 35 racks of ribs to sell and if one rack sells with baked beans, take it out of inventory." It is like the inventory doesn't talk to each other. Hate to say it, but we are starting to look into other systems that have that functionality built in. We love square, but that's an important part of our business that we just haven't figured out yet.