Advantages of Using Digital Menu Boards in Restaurants
Most restaurants are digitizing their restaurant menus instead of using traditional paper menus. Digital signage makes a huge impact on how companies portray themselves and the way they are doing business to their customers. More and more food chains are enjoying the benefits of switching from traditional static menu boards to using digital menus that are helpful in improving their business practices. There are enormous benefits of using digital menu boards for restaurants and the foodservice industry. Let’s discuss some of them:
- Easy to Change Menu: When you want to change a menu, you need to pay a designer to change it and after it is designed you again will need to invest some money to get it printed. If you have a digital menu board you need to go through all this, you can easily change the menu by yourself without spending any money. Also, it makes it easier for you to update your menu items and their process when you feel the need to change them. You can also remove the food items that are not doing well, you can add new items easily, and so on.
Digital Food Menu Tablet App - Helps you to Show Your Marketing Message: Digital menu boards are helpful in marketing as you can display your marketing messages through them like if you are planning to host an event then you can highlight it on your digital menu board or if you are offering a special offer or promotion you can also show it on your digital menu board to grab the attention of your customers.
- Contactless Digital Food Menu: Due to the prevailing situation of covid19, customers would like to prefer safe and less human-centric transactions. The digital food menu is a safe and perfect utility to provide contactless access to your food menu to your customers. Along with contactless it also excels your sales because when customers see the menu with pics they order more, it’s a tempting behavior.
- Reduces Perceived Wait Time: Adding fun facts, interesting videos, information about any forthcoming events in your digital menu boards to keep occupy your customers while they are waiting for their orders is a good way to reduce the customer’s perceived waiting time as well as providing them a good dining experience.
- Quick Ordering: Digital menu boards show real pictures of food items and this encourages customers to make a quick decision about what kind of food item they would like to order. They don’t have to go through a bunch of words. They can quickly order the food they liked when they look at the picture. This all helps you to take the orders quickly and serve more customers at a particular time. This will also reduce the waiting time of people and it will also improve your customer service rating.
- Makes Communication Easier: Restaurants can market, share custom-made menus, advertise, share nutritional information about their food items using digital menu boards. People in the restaurant business can use digital solutions in their marketing strategies to make sure that their customers receive customized information with specific formats and features.
QR code enabled digital food menu is best to serve the above-said purpose in the restaurant business. - Helps to Grab the Attention of Customers: Humans gets engaged much faster with the lively and vibrant visuals and the digital menus allow you to show pictures of your restaurant menu, the visuals of hot and spicy curry, dripping of cold drinks, etc., can stimulate customers to order the food quickly even if they are not much hungry. Thus, visually appealing digital menu boards have the ability to grab the attention of the customers much more than any other means.
- Automatic Displaying of Meals: The digital menu system makes use of dayparting programs as it is united with real-time devices so it automatically changes the meals of dinner, lunch, and breakfast as per the time, which helps the customers to know that at which particulate time slot they will get breakfast menu items, lunch food items, and dinner food items. Also, this helps the restaurateurs to increase their sales at different times of the day with suitable food items, promotions, and offers.
- Facilitates Easy Upsell and Increases Sales: Digital menu board upsell very easily as they are integrated with POS systems. With this system, the digital screen shows the complementary menu items which can increase sales. For example, if you are at a restaurant offering burgers then when a customer chooses for a particular burger then the digital board recommends, French fries, cold drinks, and other complementary items urging the customers to think of buying some additional menu items thus increasing the sales.
- Helps in Building Strong Relationships with Your Customers: Digital menu boards are simple and easy to use so your staff in the restaurant gets more time to develop relationships with the customers by asking about how was the food, would they like to give some feedback about the service or food, ask about the environment and many other things in order to improve the services. All this communication with the customers helps in developing a bond with the customer and also makes it stronger. Also, building strong relationships with customers is also essential for the marketing of your restaurant and eventually builds customer loyalty also.
- Saves Cost: Digital menus not only increase sales but they also reduce your operating cost. With digital menus, you don’t have to print menus again and again if you want to make any changes in the menu so you save the printing costs. You don’t have to worry about the printing cost, you can make changes to your menu by yourself.
- Reduces Dependency on Human Resource: As a digital menu offers automation so it frees-up your staff and minimized dependency on manpower resources. Also, as it facilitates easy ordering so it eliminates the chances of mistakes and the instances of misplaced orders. As the customers are placing the order by themselves so there are no chances of wrong orders placed and the customers are being served food the way they liked. So, we can say digital menus are a highly correct system that leaves no room for mistakes.
Some technology examples for Digital Food Menu in Restaurant Business:
- QR Code-based Digital Food Menu – QR based Digital Food Menu can work for dine-in orders directly from tables, takeaway food ordering, and delivery orders from the home or offices of your customers.
- Digital Food Menu Boards – This type of digital food menu mainly works for in premises orders like Dine-in Orders(Customer order from cash counter and restaurant staff deliver at the table) and Takeaway orders. The delivery order is quite impossible with these digital displays.
- QR based food Ordering System – In this system your QR codes linked with your web food ordering platform. Customers can easily scan QR code and get a food menu ordering system straight over their internet browsers. No need to download any apps. They can place dine-in, takeaway & delivery orders easily as per their convenience.
- Digital Food Menu Mobile App – Own a digital food menu mobile app for your restaurant has its own benefits. You can engage with your customers directly anywhere anytime, send Pugh notifications to your customers about the latest happenings, discounts, events, etc. You can change your food menu & price instantly and distribute it via push notifications. These types of apps need no physical presence of your customers.
With the advent of a new technological age where almost everything is getting digitized, restaurant menus are also going digital. Now gone are the days when people would like to see the printed menus, nowadays they have been replaced by the digital ones as there are a lot of benefits of having a digital menu as stated above.
