-B Swaminathan (publisherchefbharath@gmail.com)
When the nationwide lockdown was announced, dine-in restaurants were asked to close shop and only allow take away or home delivery which has left them to have their own team to fulfill last-mile delivery or be available on food aggregators such as Swiggy and Zomato. The other option would be to have their own branded online presence in a quick span of time and tying up for logistics.
In the current highly-competitive environment chefs and hoteliers should create the right first impression potential guests enter their restaurant physically or digitally. The digital presence of the restaurants includes world-class websites and mobile applications, a rightly-thought after digital marketing and branding strategy to stay relevant in this era of digital transformation. Search engines are changing how we think about recipe-finding. Video sites, are teaching us how to cure bacon and chop an onion and truss a chicken.
Chennai based CETAS tech has developed an application – ‘FOS 365’, exclusively for the restaurants. Some of the key features of the app include online ordering, table reservation, tracking of delivery, customer survey, marketing, loyalty or reward points, and social media. “Food Tech Start-up’s non-sustainable economic model has created a gap in the supply and demand situation in the food home delivery business. Identifying this gap Cetas has developed FOS365 a solution that can enable restaurants to kick start their own branded online channel and engage their loyal clients to place home delivery and take away orders. The solution offers restaurants feature such as Online Ordering, Table reservation, Delivery Tracking, Loyalty & Campaign Management, Digital Marketing Services and Customer Surveys, analytics to enable informed decision making.”, says Shyam Kumar, Director, CETAS Information Technology, in a chat with ‘ChefBharath.com‘.
CETAS assures training and support services which include creating end-to-end set-up, signing up, accounting and billing, ‘how-to’ articles and FAQs. The software provider also assures service and software updates, software configuration, client connectivity and more. Speaking further on the same, Shayam says, ” The key benefits realized by the customers using FOS365; branded online presence in a quick span of time, keeping ones customer data secure (not shared to a third party food ordering app) and analysing customer preferences. “Another key advantage includes offering right options, relieved one from IT Infra expenses, ready integration with back end systems (accounting, Inventory), loyalty and promotion management enabling client retention.”, he concluded.