Sync your kitchen and frontend with Streamlined Order Management
It's 6:00pm on a Saturday night and the phones are ringing off the hook with new orders. People are waiting inline to pick up their food and your seated customers (assuming the pandemic eventually ended) are asking their waiter how much longer it will be until their meals are ready. That puts a lot of pressure on your staff. And even though the person taking the phone orders, the waiter and your kitchen staff are all working towards the same goal, namely to get the correct orders ready and out as quickly as possible, they're not working together.
First, the person taking the phone orders has to try to hear the customer on the other end of the line over all of the restaurant noise associated with a busy Saturday night. So, this process can be quite error prone. Plus, customers often "forget" to mention things, that they later claim to have said. Which can put your staff in an awkward spot. Next, the kitchen has to interpret the order that was taken by the waiter or the phone order person. This is another link in the chain where orders can be made incorrectly. Then, when the kitchen puts the order in the "ready spot", the waiter or phone person must connect the customers with the correct order. Which isn't always easy, when customers don't remember whose name the order was placed under and they have five or six phone numbers for you to check. Finally, throughout this whole process, your customers are kept in the dark. Essentially, once they place their order they have to wait around and wonder if it's ready yet.
Our Solutions for Order Management:
- Customer Created Orders: Allowing the customer to complete the order themselves helps alleviate the awkwardness of telling a customer that they never said they didn't want onions (and other such errors). Because the customer entered all the details it's easy to reference the original order and point out what was, and more importantly, what wasn't included in the order.
- Order Ready Alerts: Your customers will love our "Order Ready" alerts. Once your kitchen marks as order as ready. The customer who placed that order is automatically sent an alert informing them of their order's status. This note only helps limit the number of customers waiting in line, but also makes your customers feel more connected and loved by your restaurant.
- Turn Ordering Off: Are you ready to cry uncle and say "no more orders today!", well that's no problem with MenuCrunch, as you can turn online ordering off (and back on) with the click of a button. This can help slow things down if your kitchen staff is overwhelmed or you just want to shut down early for the evening. And when you turn ordering off, your restaurant's menu doesn't go offline. It just transitions to view only mode, so your customers can still plan their meal for tomorrow. One additional thing to note about your menu's ordering status is that ordering is automatically turned off and on based on the open/closed hours you input for your restaurant.
- Easily Searchable Orders: When it's finally a customers turn to pick up their order, the nice front desk person asks their name. They reply, "Bob, but I think my girlfriend put the order under her name, which is Karen". But, there are no Bobs or Karens listed in the order records. So, the front desk person asks for a phone number and our friend Bob replies, "well, it could be our home phone, or my cell, but then again I just changed numbers...". What a waste of time. With MenuCrunch, you just type in any of the fields, name, phone or email, all of which are required to place an order, and you'll find the customer in no time.
These are just a few of the amazing features that you will have access to when using MenuCrunch. Want to try it out? Get started!
Frontend & Kitchen Harmony
One of the driving ideas behind the creation of MenuCrunch was to connect the frontend and backend of the restaurant so that they can work together in a more streamlined manner. To accomplish this, we focused on making the "order" a connection point between these two unique places in the restaurant.
