As the pandemic continues, the restaurant industry is, of course, not back to business as usual. Although many establishments have been allowed to open for on-premise dining, limitations that support social distancing have meant that customers have looked to delivery, takeout, curbside, and drive-thru to fill the gap, among other creative solutions.
But the increase in off-premise dining isn’t a fast trend that will go away, the data shows. Off-premise sales were already growing four times faster than dine-in before the pandemic. Going forward, the restaurant landscape will likely continue to look different than it did before 2020. That means if you’re a restaurant owner, now is the time to up your delivery game; the best way to accomplish that is to reduce your reliance on third-party apps by launching in-house delivery.
Benefits of Doing Your Own Delivery
At the beginning of the pandemic, many restaurants with limited or no delivery capabilities had no other choice than to employ third-party delivery services to get food and beverages to their customers. While they may have seemed like a good option at the time, the exorbitant commission fees, often around 30 percent or more, would often eat away at any possibility of making a profit. Bringing delivery in-house eliminates the middleman and therefore allows you to keep much more of your hard-earned money.
Not only does keeping delivery close to home increase your margin, but it also allows you to have better control over food quality and the entire customer experience. Customers who receive a late order or get food that has been temperature abused often resort to blaming the restaurant, not the delivery service. By maintaining control of the journey from the kitchen to the destination, restaurant owners can ensure a safe and positive experience for their customers.
Customer experience is the key factor that will foster brand loyalty and keep people coming back time and again — regardless of what is going on in the world. Even if required to stay home and self-quarantine, delivery of a favorite food or knowing that you’re supporting a favorite local business can make things feel a little more like normal.
Tips For Bringing Delivery In-House
Managing the day-to-day operations of a restaurant business is already challenging, so trying to add delivery to your list of responsibilities may seem overwhelming. However, the most important thing to remember is that you don’t have to do it all at once. You can start by evaluating your menu and selecting a handful of your most popular items that travel well. Paring down your menu and creating one specifically for delivery will help reduce complexity and set your delivery efforts up for success.
Next, hire a couple of drivers — or bring back waiters, bartenders of bar-backs that you may have had to lay off after the pandemic hit — and ask them do what they do best–customer service; this time, it’s just on the road. You don’t have to have an entire fleet up and running at the start, but make sure to keep a close eye on how it grows so you can be prepared to meet demand.
Finally, get the word out about your delivery offerings in whatever way possible. Publish it on social media, send emails to your subscriber list, and hand out fliers to your in-house diners. Creating awareness and staying top of mind is how you ensure that the next time someone wants a meal delivered to their home or business, they think of you.
Bring Delivery In House With GetSwift
The prospect of launching in-house delivery, including hiring your own drivers, can be daunting. But getting started is actually much faster and much easier than you think. Your team will be able to get the hang of it pretty quickly — just listen to our customers — and the rewards of going in-house, for your culture, morale, and bottom line, are too big to pass up. Interested in getting started with a free one-month trial? Contact a member of our team today to learn how we can help.
Just about every business from the largest to the smallest wasn’t prepared for the monumental shift that has been occurring in delivery due to COVID-19. Food delivery was 300 times more popular in April than it was just a month prior. Another report looking at the impact on grocery sales estimates that online grocery sales will grow 40% in 2020 due to COVID.
Double and even triple-digit growth means significant challenges in trying to fill orders, meet expected delivery times, and communicate with customers. Those who adapt and succeed at delivery will come out ahead and delivery service software is the easiest way to do just that. Here’s how GetSwift can help you with some of your biggest challenges with managing drivers.
1. Save Time
Managing orders and assigning drivers can be a resource drain. If you’re still using whiteboards and online calendars and then manually calling or texting your drivers, you know that it can be very labor-intensive. Any day-of and last-minute changes (and there will be changes) require you to completely rework the schedule and communicate the changes with everyone involved. Right from your GetSwift dashboard, you can view all jobs, automatically dispatch orders to drivers, reassign a job to a different driver, track all drivers in real-time, and so much more, all saving a significant amount of time.
Concerned about the time it will take to get up to speed with a new system? We’ve designed our software so that you can be up and running quickly. Just see how easy it is to Get Started and take a driver online so they can log in to the mobile app.
2. Improve Communication
With a constant stream of orders and frequent changes, communication with your drivers is key. With just the click of a button, our delivery service software allows you to manage jobs and relay any changes instantly. For instance, you can assign, transfer, or cancel jobs. Need to reprioritize which orders get delivered first? Our app lets you manually reorder them and then it sends the driver notification of the change. You can even limit tasks or change the capacity of an individual driver.
3. Track Driver Status
You don’t have to wait and wonder where your driver is or try to contact them to see if they’ve completed a delivery. Now you can track your drivers in real-time on the GetSwift map. Color-coded driver icons tell you the status of each driver: whether they’ve available, already accepted a job, or they’re en route to their destinations. You can even check on the progress of each individual driver by seeing how many of their jobs they still have to complete and their ETA at their next destination.
4. Route Optimization
You can also stop planning out your daily routes (which are often bound to change) at the start every day. With GetSwift, you can automatically optimize the route of each driver with a click, and our algorithm is not only going to select the best route, but it’s also going to be continuously searching for an even better route using real-time data (on traffic and dozens of other factors). The result leads to faster delivery, a major way to increase customer satisfaction.
5. Easy Access To Performance Data
Being able to track metrics and KPIs helps you to keep a pulse on your business. It also gives you the information you need to identify and resolve problems, become more efficient, and make a plan for growth. With GetSwift, you’ll have quick access to high-level performance indicators such as the number of deliveries per day or average delivery time. You can also generate reports that give you insight into every area of your delivery business. Simply choose the report you wish to run, such as key delivery stats or driver feedback ratings and you instantly have data to sort, filter, download, or export.
Manage Your Drivers More Efficiently With GetSwift
Are you interested in learning more about how GetSwift’s delivery service software can help your business grow? Contact us today to learn how we can help.
Dispatching is part of the supply chain process that involves organizing transportation and assigning drivers. Anyone who has experience with dispatching knows that it involves many moving parts, countless details, and a small army of people to keep everything running smoothly. Without a streamlined system in place, you can get caught up in the never-ending cycle of reactive scheduling and spend too much time manually planning routes, tracking vehicles, and organizing driver’s appointments. If you’re still manually managing routes and schedules through phone calls and spreadsheets, GetSwift is here to show you that there’s a better way — and it’s called dispatch software.
GetSwift is the leader in delivery management software, and that includes features for managing your dispatching. With dispatch software, you can free up staff time by automatically dispatching jobs in an instant. But that’s only the beginning. Our dispatch software will put you in control and provide you with easy-to-use tools that will allow you to fully optimize the entire process. You’ll be amazed at the advantages your business can realize when you move to a fully customizable web-based system.
Take Control of Your Logistics System
Whether your business consists of just a few people or dozens of locations, dispatch software is the best way to manage getting people and products to the right place at the right time. It can help you analyze, plan, and dispatch resources more efficiently while maintaining real-time communication with all parties involved.
Could your logistics department use some extra help? Here is just a high-level overview of some of the features of our dispatch software:
Automate your entire dispatching process
Assign drivers based on load, distance, and driver rating
Easy-to-use app keeps drivers in the know
Track driver location in real-time
Additional options like limiting jobs once a driver has reached a specified quantity
Ability to choose between automatic or manual dispatching
Simple-to-use but powerful enough for any business
See What Dispatch Software Can Do For Your Company
Our dispatching software has so many features and it’s fully customizable to help the smallest business or the largest enterprise. It’s simple enough for just about anyone to use and it’s backed by GetSwift’s support team, to help you whenever you need it. Here are just a few ways that our dispatch software can help you:
Visibility
If you own a small business, keeping all team members in the know might not be that hard of a task. However, as your business starts to grow, it will become increasingly difficult to manage all of the moving parts. With our software, you’ll have one centralized system for employees to get accurate, up to date information 24-hours a day.
Effective Driver Scheduling
Dispatch the right driver for the job at the right time and do it without having to employ a huge logistics team. Our software will make assigning and tracking drivers easy and you’ll remain in control. Set rules for how drivers are selected based on performance, distance, or load. Drivers receive job notifications and change alerts immediately through a simple-to-use app they can access right from their phone.
Shrink Delivery Times
Determining the best driver for the job isn’t such a big task when you have dispatch software to help. It will do the hard work of analyzing the data for you and recommending the closest driver, the driver with time available, or the one that has the room on their truck. Gone are the days of having to track locations, taking weather, traffic, and driving conditions into play, and trying to make the best guess on who the right person is for the job. Let our software offer you a much easier way to coordinate routes, drivers, and deliveries efficiently.
Improve Customer Satisfaction
When you streamline your transportation process and back it with the power of technology, your customers will notice. Better dispatching and scheduling means fewer errors, improved delivery times, and greater operational efficiency. All of these pieces work together to deliver a better customer experience.
Your customers expect timely, dependable service. Not only that, but the bar keeps getting raised when it comes to customer expectations and delivery times. Make sure you can offer your customers what they expect and do it in the most efficient way possible with dispatch software.
Contact GetSwift to Start Your Free Trial
At GetSwift, we’re in the business of helping your business grow. We’re confident that no matter what size of business you have, you’ll see big benefits with our dispatching software. But don’t just take our word for it, sign up now to try our 30-day risk-free trial and see for yourself. Call today!
Are you looking to streamline your transportation process to improve efficiency and boost customer satisfaction? Contact GetSwift to sign up for your one-month risk-free trial.
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