If you are a restaurant owner aiming to boost sales or an entrepreneur investing in a startup of an online multi-restaurant food delivery app, you need exceptional mobile app features built to lure in the target audience.
Not so long ago, there were static websites and a few obscure mobile apps that people sporadically used to locate nearest brick-and-mortar eateries or glimpse at their online menu.
However, as consumers grew more tech-savvy and social, we could see a whole new generation of modern, dynamic mobile apps for finding, booking and ordering restaurants meals online.
A research on online food delivery service suggests that the restaurant industry reached the total revenue of $160 million via mobile application in 2015.
Due to this mammoth growth, the food industry today relies greatly on digital solutions to spellbind new customers as well as retain them for repeat business. From effortless dining experience to ease of payment and organized table booking, there is a lot you can implement to make your food app a big success.
To encourage more customers to resort to your online restaurant business, you can even think of building several customized features for your restaurant mobile app.
Here we have summed up a few must-have restaurant mobile app features if you are planning to build it from scratch:
1) Engaging Push Messages
Push notifications have nowadays become an undeniable element of every successful mobile app especially in service industry. These messages not only help capture massive attention of users, but, if executed wisely, it also distinguishes from other similar mobile apps.
Food business apps typically need the sublime message content with relevant appeal and appreciable pace in order to extract its real power.
Let it pop up on users’ mobile screen to inform them about the special offers, personalized treatment and handsome discounts.
If the message is bold enough to match user expectations, he or she will feel interested to take time off and explore the app to know more, resulting in perfect customer engagement.
To make push message surface and appear conspicuous, you need a solid and mature marketing strategy.
2) Accessibility across multiple platforms
Your restaurant booking and food delivery app needs to target a broad group of customers using many different devices working on separate platforms such as iOS and Android.
In order be paramount in the game and reach the colossal amount of customers, you must focus on building the restaurant app that works for both iOS and Android.
Make your app accessible in App store and Google Play so that you can make your food app visible to all curious app store visitors who will be willing to download the app like yours.
3) The power of rich media content
Nobody appreciates a dry app that is built just to stick to the business purpose. Users want more. Having rich media in place such as videos, images or other pleasant expressions related to food gives your app the lively personality and opportunity to engage more deeply with customers.
You can make a video of a recipe or include vivid images of lush food items, venue or menu.
Elements of visuals directly capture attention of users and encourage them to explore more. You can even let customers make their food diary and share them among fellow users and friends.
Give your customers some liberty to fiddle with your app and relish the power of various media rich content.
4) Location based services
Now that apps have a way to interact with smartphone’s local environment, you can get the most out of popular location-based services such as geo-fencing and beacons to enhance customer-oriented services.
Today’s sophisticated brands refine their messages of relevant offers, deals, menu and discounts to potential customers as they stroll by the brick-and-mortar structure of a restaurant.
Location-based technologies thus add value and competitive edge to modern food and restaurant service entrepreneurs. This approach helps restaurant brands steer clear from the use of physical flyers and promotional pamphlets.
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5) Table reservation system
When your customers walk in, it is possible that they may not get a table due to high rush of eaters. This often happens to high-end restaurants where it is important to make prior reservation and walk-ins are left waiting.
To avoid unpleasant customer experience, build a convenient table reservation system inside your app so that people can easily book their tables at desirable timings and plan their evening dates in advance.
6) Cashless payment system
Cashless mode of payment is enthusiastically promoted and appreciated by smartphone users. Mobile payments have become the most preferable money transfer and digital payment solution. A research says that the amount of mobile payments is likely to reach $210.45 billion by 2019.
This means it is a modern-day compulsion for mobile-savvy users to initiate a transaction using your smartphone. Customers also want to take advantage of the technology that facilitates cashless system to avoid boring wait time for order processing and pay beforehand.
This is why you must build a feature that securely enables online payment within your restaurant food order app. Let alone Starbucks generated almost 21% of US sales revenue from mobile payments in 2015.
7) Personalization for relationship and engagement
Ecommerce and on-demand mobile applications greatly capitalize on the elements of personalization. It is difficult to dispense without having personalized features in your restaurant mobile app since the it lets your customers experience the same food differently.
To establish a viable personalization system in place, you can integrate a solid analytics system in the backend that tracks user’s activities, choices & past history.
Based on the results, your app suggests most relevant products and offers, which means existing customers get their favorite cuisines in little efforts. This further helps build stronger relationship and intense engagement with customers.
8) Staff management
This is one of the essential features for owner side of the restaurant app. You can manage your staff and their activities and optimize their efficiency using this feature.
It helps you track and maintain the size of your restaurant staff as well as monitor their performance daily. This custom feature enables you to make changes to your employees’ performance score and boost task efficiency and service productivity as they perform their duties.
9) Social media activities
There is rarely any app out there that does not offer social media integration to users. From ecommerce to on-demand service, mobile apps observe better usability by means of social sharing.
In restaurant mobile apps, social integration will help customers share their experience and reviews with their connections or take pictures or videos and upload them on their social profiles on Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.
You can even generate loyalty rewards or discounts for customers by encouraging them to invite their friends on social media. Thus you can entice and coax new customers and create repeat business opportunity.
10) Loyalty rewards
The investment involved in gaining brand loyalty is less overwhelming than what customer acquisition costs. The cost of creating brand awareness is almost 5 times higher than retaining existing customers.
Moreover, Statista’s 2015 survey says nearly 26% customers use the mobile app to redeem or earn loyalty points. This indicates how crucial it is for your business to pay immense attention to offering charming loyalty programs.
Make your regular customers feel special and keep them clung to your restaurant services with a loyalty coupon and reward points which they can redeem with pleasure.
11) Chat support
On-demand and food apps should have a prompt and reliable customer support system and chat is the best way to fulfill incoming queries. While building a restaurant mobile app, it is a prudent decision to invest in dedicated chat features.
To automate response for common customer queries, you can aim at having a chatbot built into your app. Many restaurant owners have embraced this new technology of chabots that run on pre-programmed AI-powered logic to conduct real-time conversations with users and resolve their basic questions and FAQs.
Read Also: How much does it cost to create an app like Zomato
Conclusion
Having a mobile app definitely opens many doors of vibrant opportunities to succeed. To make you dream come true, you will require talent and resources from the best mobile app development partner.
Redbytes possess extensive experience in providing dedicated mobile app development services and can help your food business skyrocket. Delivering an excellent user experience, our veteran team of developers and designers will create both versions of apps for customers and owners.