Tools | Quinn Bowman
“Even with multiple phone lines and dedicated personnel, customers were becoming increasingly discouraged by hold times and busy signals,” says Steven Shaffer, Chappy’s IT Director. “We discovered that the majority of mis-rings resulted from this intense pressure of call volume—trying to speed through one call just to get to another which in turn led to further customer discouragement.”
Though Dineen acknowledges online ordering accounts for a small percentage of the restaurant business, he says more companies are looking to add the service in the future.
Online ordering only made sense for pizza delivery three or four years ago, Dineen says, but now any restaurant could feasibly use online orders to collect take-out or delivery orders.
“If it’s not something they want to do today, in 12 to 24 months if you’re not trying to get it set up you’re going to be behind,” he says. “[This] is sort of the crest of the wave.”
Banking on that potential growth, Direct Technology Innovations (DTI), a company that provides restaurant credit card processing, launched its own online ordering service, Click to Go, in May.
Terri Melle, DTI’s director of marketing, says company employees were placing a large lunch time phone order one day when they realized that utilizing a Web page to order the food would be faster and easier.
“We order lunch on a regular basis, and it was more and more cumbersome to order everything,” Melle says. “Someone said: ‘Wouldn’t it be great to order everything online?’ Marketing and sales found that we could do this fairly quickly and easily.”
DTI is partnering with two companies, Kudzu Interactive and Delphis Software, to create an online ordering function on any restaurant’s existing Web site. Company IT professionals will create the online tools for customers to place an order, which will then transmit through fax machine or point-of-sale system into the restaurant.
Melle pitches her company’s service as an inexpensive way for single restaurants or small chains to compete with huge franchises. “The larger players like Pizza Hut and Papa John’s make it hard for mom and pop,” she says. “We have single-store ownerships out there that can be competitive online.”
Click To Go services begin at $500 for setup costs and less than $1.50 per day to maintain, Melle says.
A recent online poll by AIS Media confirms the notion that a large number of restaurant customers are at least turning to the Internet to interact with restaurants. The June poll of 2,517 consumers nationwide via e-mail found that 89 percent of responders have researched a restaurant online before visiting, while 57 percent say they checked out the restaurant’s Web site.