Nurturing Off Premise Revenue Growth
Don’t believe everything you hear on the internet…
Despite what your friendly local third-party platform rep may show up espousing, growing your digital presences is not just about the dollars you are willing to invest. In fact, growing off premise revenue is often more operationally focused than folks give it credit for. In this article we will break down the biggest controllable inputs that factor into third-party visibility and offer actionable insights that inform how you too can conquer this new digital landscape.
Online visibility
While it make strike as initially obvious, the biggest factor into showing up online, is well… being online. Third party platforms like Doordash, Uber and Grubhub tremendously value partners that are consistent and reliable in showing up to execute for their guests. For those clients that are focused on off premise revenue growth it is imperative to show up here.
Now before we dive into the fun stuff, it’s important to ensure we’re all speaking the same language. When we talk about digital uptime we are calculating available online minutes (ie unpaused minutes) divided by total available minutes (ie sum of minutes your restaurant has provided to a given platform for online availability in a given period).
So, in simple terms, we are talking about time spent un-paused.
We’ve worked with clients all over the globe and have identified a few commonalities around when partners most frequently pause platforms:
During Peak Times
We’ve found that operators tend to pause during peak and don’t tend to unpause until the end of shoulder period. It isn’t ground-breaking — but what is, are the solutions that exist to automatically unpause you. We’ve spent years cutting through all of the noise and vetting out the best-of-the-best in the industry for our clients.
Shoulder
It makes sense. You get busy with walk-in guests and pause digital platforms to focus on throughput.
The opportunity here lies within un-pausing. Peak capacity exists in a vacuum, we’re packed with guests and then as quickly as the bottleneck emerged, it passes. As digital optimizers, we want to capitalize on every moment as optimally as we can. It’s critical to un-pause once we become un-tangled. And working with partners around the globe, it’s become increasingly obvious that this just isn’t as simple as it sounds. Operators forget to un-pause and waste precious low-capacity labor hours turned off on digital platforms.
Order accuracy
Our guests want to receive what they order. It’s exactly as simple as it sounds and quite frankly, way more complex than it presents.
As focus on driving basket size has evolved, we’ve found increasingly effective (see our next article on check drivers!) ways to encourage consumers to order more and more. This phenomenon, combined with an increasing customer fixation on customization, has driven an emerging focus on accurate orders.
Order accuracy is defined as a combination of missing and inaccurate guest complaints / total tickets received by a business.
Add-ons tend to go missing.
While every business is different, we tend to find that folks are much more likely to miss inclusion of an add-on (think drink, side or dessert) rather than incorrectly substitute one item for another (think cookie vs slice of cake).
86-ing is hard, but critical.
Working on the line, we know when we run out. Particularly for those businesses that have yet to fully optimize their tech stack, it can be extremely difficult to communicate that to our ordering audience.
Optimizing pars is the best way to start. That said, optimizing pars is HARD. And so at M&P we’ve made it, well our job, to inform on the abundance of outright solutions and backend hacks that can make you whole here.
Say sorry when you’re sorry.
Acknowledging when you get it wrong goes a long way. And an effective customer recovery strategy goes way “long-er”.
On-time orders
If you’ve made it this far, you get it. Our guests want what they want — and they want it when they want it.
Late orders are a huge contributer to churn. When we segment our clientele out, we know we are not only executing for the individual, but for the office executive ordering for a group of clients. Put another way, as restauranteurs we not only serve our clients, but our clients clients. That’s a lot of pressure! That’s why we’ve put in the hard work to crack the code for on-time propsperity:
Intelligent quote times set teams up to succeed.
It all comes down to setting our teams up for success. M&P works directly with your team to understand what technology you are using to determine quote time by critical measures like day part and day of week; and then we compare these to your labor deployment to identify strategic gaps.
Order cadence is imperative.
We only have so much bandwidth. Between all of your channels, it is essential that you are providing your boots-on-the-ground with the means to achieve the A-grade here. We have hundreds of hours of expertise analyzing and perfecting throttling strategies.
The algorithm is always iterating — are you?
At Meat & Potatoes we offer a revenue guarantee — thats 2.0X back your initial investment, or your money back guaranteed.
Reach out today at mpfbconsultancy@gmail.com to set up your first FREE consultation.