Restaurant Customer Behaviour after COVID : Impact on local restaurant business – 2021

According to AMC Global market research report, 38% of consumers are inclined to support local businesses in 2021 and beyond. Though the local restaurant businesses had a big impact with most of them opting to either downsize or close their restaurants, some of them quickly adapted to the usage of digital technology and delivery partners for their business sustenance.

Now with the COVID impact receding and people getting back to normal life styles and practices, retaining the interest of the customers in local players has become more challenging for local restaurateurs with people opting to move around.

Sustenance of the innovations that were in vogue owing during COVID times. Need for direct food delivery from the restaurant:

Customers got used to home delivery methods, ease of ordering through delivery partners, ordering through aggregator apps and many such innovations.  Now with things getting back to normalcy and the Government’s change of stance on service taxes, the pricing of the delivery partners are impacting the end customers as well.  Should the restaurants resort to have an innovative and effective local delivery mechanism it could win back the local customers.  

Thanks to COVID! According to a recent survey published in Livemint, More than 70% of the local restaurateurs in Tier 1 cities have learnt to use technology for handling direct delivery orders.  But not without loosing a big share of their profit to the aggregators.

This would be the ideal to time for the restaurants to go for their own local delivery mechanism.

All they need is to re-align their own delivery process by choosing the right and cost-effective technology with seamless implementation.  

Let us have a look at how the local restaurateurs could adapt to effective methods that could put them back on track with continued customer patronage.

1. Deploying a simple and effective solution for restaurant direct delivery. Give the advantage of discounts directly to your local customers by just parting a portion of what they have been losing to the common food delivery apps.  This would fetch newer customers.

2. Adapting a robust technology for managing delivery orders thereby using staffs for effective logistics and quality delivery.

3. Adapting to contactless dine-in and table side ordering methods.

4. Simplified restaurant operations using state of the art POS Software, like Kitchen order tracking, Inventory management etc.

5. To offer contemporary dishes from time to time by adapting innovative, emerging methods for better recipe management and to create a profitable menu.

It is important for the local restaurateurs to choose a technology solution that is backed with a solid understanding of their needs in the local scenario. Let us the see top tech trends for restaurants along with their features in the next article.