“Let’s get takeout…”
Possibly three of the greatest words you’ll hear all week. A Friday night Netflix binge + your favourite food delivered to your door is one of modern life’s guilty pleasures, or perhaps you’re just not so guilty about it.
More power to you…
Either way, it’s rising in popularity and we’re clearly not afraid to splurge—for every £1 that UK consumers spend on food, 12p is spent on takeaways.
The British Takeaway Campaign estimates that UK consumers spent £9.9bn on takeaways—a figure that’s expected to rise to £11.2bn by 2021.
Figures from Cambridge University’s Centre for Diet and Activity Research, show that England boasts over 56,500 takeaways. That’s a stomach-rumbling quarter of the country’s food outlets.
Even most of the remaining three-quarters that fall under ‘restaurants’ have a ‘takeout’ function via the recent boom in food-delivery apps.
Timing is everything
Although restaurant takeout isn’t always ‘fast food’, it still needs to be… fast. For time-poor city dwellers used to instant everything, ‘soon’ just isn’t soon enough.
Speed of delivery is the biggest factor in customer satisfaction, with 60% of consumers expecting their food in less than 60 minutes.
Imagine. Your customers open their food app and browse your menu at length. They finally make a selection and click ‘place order’.
Then they wait…
A food courier glides by outside… it’s for one of the neighbours.
They wait some more, scowling at empty plates already on the table, and start to get funny ideas about writing an online review.
The golden 60 minutes pass and still… NOTHING. That 1-star review starts to become more likely.
So what gives…?
Turns out your kitchen prepped the order on time—only the courier has been mooching around in your restaurant for 15 minutes, undetected, while your team focus on the all-important table service.
To compound the issue, the food sat idle in your kitchen is now cold and might even put you at risk of breaching food standards which dictate that hot food must be kept at 63°C or above and anything left out for more than two hours must be thrown away.
A market with tight margins leaves little breathing room. Restaurants can’t afford to drop the ball on in-house atmosphere, takeout delivery times or food standards.
So what’s the solution? How can restaurants spin the in-house and takeout plates at once without collecting those 1-star reviews?
You’re quicker connected…
The issue here is clearly one of communication and the solution is technological. Restaurateurs already know that technology is the thing that’s most likely to influence their business performance next year.
Connecting the different elements of operations more closely is the key to a smooth service that satisfies the scrutiny of both the in-house crowd and the food-app fiends—VoCoVo does just that.
By making flawless communication between kitchen, front-of-house and couriers virtually inevitable, VoCoVo empowers restaurants to make the 5-star experience the order of the day, every day.
VoCoVo Headsets provide discreet, crystal-clear, two-way communication between front of house and kitchen while VoCoVo CallPoints let food couriers announce their arrival swiftly and discreetly—with the touch of a button that sends a voice message to team headsets—so they can be in-and-out while takeouts are still hot, and before the in-house experience goes cold.