What Should a Restaurant’s Food Ordering App Include?
While the smartphone app market is full of general food-delivery-service options, there is still plenty of demand for restaurant-specific apps. Whether you own a chain of fast-food locations or a single high-end restaurant, you can streamline your ordering process and reach more customers by designing a custom app.
Yet a poorly designed restaurant app causes frustration for customers rather than joy. To make sure your food ordering app offers a pleasant experience, include at least these five features.
Menu Photos
You should include text descriptions of each menu item, but a menu that is solely text misses out on some of the best opportunities offered by a food ordering app. Since app users are guaranteed to access the software through a smartphone with a quality display screen, food photos make a big impact.
Don’t just snap low-quality shots of your dishes to add to the app either. Paying for professional photography of your restaurant’s food may increase the total cost of developing the app, but you’ll earn that investment back relatively quickly thanks to increased impulse orders when customers see flattering shots of your best items.
Delivery Tracking
Restaurants that don’t offer delivery can still benefit from ordering apps, but this kind of software development is especially valuable to establishments offering delivery. Your app should communicate clearly with users to let them know when an order is received, the food is prepared, and the delivery is sent out.
This sounds complex, but plenty of coding tricks can automate the process. You don’t necessarily have to increase the workload of your restaurant staff by more than the push of a button with the right design of your app.
Customization Control
One of the biggest reasons restaurant customers sometimes avoid using food ordering apps is due to a lack of customization options. A diner who doesn’t want tomatoes on their burger or who can’t eat a dish with shrimp needs a way to communicate their preferences and needs.
Your app can accomplish this in many ways, from a series of buttons to press to alter the order to text input. Make sure the workers preparing the food actually see the modified order or there’s little reason to offer customization options to your customers.
Previous Orders
Few app users download and install software just to use it once. By tracking a customer’s order history within the app, you’re encouraging repeat use by making orders as easy as possible. If someone always orders the same salad for lunch while they’re at work, the app should make placing that repeat order as easy as possible.
To take order history to the next level, include orders placed in the restaurant without the use of the app. You need to connect the app to a digital point-of-service (POS) software package running on the in-store registers. Integrated POS software offers many benefits on its own, making the upgrade to this kind of software worthwhile regardless of app connectivity.
Review Options
The best restaurants still make mistakes, and you need to hear about those issues from the customer before they turn to a public forum to share them. Integrating a review option directly into the app gives you a chance to capture complaints while they’re easy to remedy. For best results, add a text input area so users can do more than just give a transaction a star or numerical rating.
App development may sound intimidating, but we make the process easy here at jācapps. Let us create a useful and attractive food ordering app for your restaurant. Contact us today to get started.
