Online food booking applications are seeing great growth potential. The online food delivery culture all over the world has seen a robust rise during and after the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown due to its convenience. However, this rise seems to slow down when the social distancing becomes less significant and people start to dine out even more. As a result, F&B businesses should comprehend the changes in customer behaviors to modify important features in their online booking application and website.
Businesses have to know these top 8 most essential features in a F&B online booking application.
1. Push notifications
Push notifications are clickable pop-up messages that show up on a user’s mobile device. It can be a great method to make your company stand out from your competitors since it helps business stay connected with your customers. These pop-up messages can have a variety of topics, from announcing your available discounts, special offers, location-based advertising etc.
Firstly, Making sure that push notifications offer your customers values and aren’t merely advertisements is something to keep in mind. Secondly, push notifications must not be sent too many within a day or your customers will think it is spammy and unnecessary to turn on your application’s notifications.
2. Easy payment options
Payment options is one of the 8 must-have features in every F&B online booking application. In “2021 State of Payment Report”, most respondents replied that they prioritized convenient payment methods when it comes to choosing a local business besides the most significant factor, which is customer services. Thus, providing customers with a variety of payment options would probably boost the conversion rate and customer loyalty.
Debit, credit, and prepaid cards are much preferred than cash. Allowing your customers to utilize numerous methods of payment by incorporating with all the payment gateways or available digital wallet app services may incentivize customers to make an order and increase the chance of the next purchases. To encourage the use of payment methods, you might think about providing discounts or voucher codes.
3. Easy order placement
Order placement process in the F&B online booking application is quick and more convenient. As a result, customers prefer buying online rather than waiting in a long line in front of a food stall to get their order. Ensuring the customers’ easy order placement has things to do with the application’s user friendliness. This can be achieved by designing the user interface (UI) of your application. The purpose of UI design is to anticipate what users will need to do and ensure the interface’s user-friendliness.
Businesses should track how customers feel and use their application’s user interface. If the UI takes too much time to load, the customer satisfaction will be badly affected. A prosperous UI design will bring a positive customer experience, attract new customers and increase sales.
4. Order scheduling and pickups
Before modern online food booking applications appeared, customers were not allowed to schedule their orders and set up the time to pick up their food. When they had to work overtime and didn’t have time to order lunch or dinner, they might skip that meal since they didn’t have enough time to get to the food stall and place their order. With order scheduling and pickup features in food booking applications, it only takes a few minutes to customize an order and customers will receive their orders at the time that they wanted. Order scheduling is also a useful function that helps customers to save their time. Hence, F&B businesses must have this feature on their applications to ensure a more convenient customer experience and flexible eating time.
5. Search filters
Customers may spend hours surfing your food application and hesitate to decide what they eat for lunch or dinner. To make it simpler for clients to identify dishes that suit their preferences, businesses should develop intelligent search filters. Distance, preferences, and food type might be a few recommended filters that you can offer in your online booking application.
6. Recommendation of the best sellers
Invesp revealed that 49% of the customers believed that a personalized recommendation positively affected their purchase decision and they might purchase an item inadvertently, 59% of retailers claimed that product recommendation drove most order value in customer purchases and 75% of the customers responded that they loved buying things based on personalized recommendations. Besides smart search filters, F&B businesses should also consider adding a “Recommendation of the best sellers” function to reduce the customers’ hesitating time. This function uses big data analytics to identify the most popular food and restaurants for each individual’s taste.
7. Contactless delivery
The Covid-19 pandemic has become much better now, but businesses have to be well-prepared for any unexpected problems. When a customer orders anything and selects contactless delivery, the courier drops the package at the door of the customer. Through the mobile application, the courier communicates with the customer to send a photo of the delivered order.
Customers can request their delivery riders to leave food at the doorsteps, lobby or their chosen alternative location. For instance, Grubhub and Uber Eats have used this feature from the very beginning of the Covid-19 social distancing.
8. QR codes
Online food ordering applications may find QR codes to be a useful addition. They enable a variety of consumer activities, such as swiftly ordering their preferred dish from the menu and processing payments. Additionally, they can share their referral code on social media or with others by scanning these QR codes.
Grubhub, a well-known app for ordering and delivering food, employs QR codes to enable speedy payment for orders.
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Jun 27, 2023
