Our world is slowly recovering from a COVID-19 pandemic, and normal daily life is getting back on track. It would be comforting to think that food delivery companies that have been working tirelessly can breathe a sigh of relief and have a brief rest. However, this would be a big mistake to make. The fight for the customer’s hearts and stomachs is just starting.
Each food delivery service must try hard to maintain customers’ interest, given the amount of competition. The colossal demand for food delivery during quarantine has led to many new players appearing who want to claim their places in this race. Yesterday’s cafes and restaurants transformed themselves, adapted to circumstances, launched personal delivery services, and cooperated with world giants such as Uber Eats, Doordash, Grubhub, and others.
Such variety has led to a golden rule in the industry-cooking delicious food and delivering it in time is no longer sufficient to be the best. Modern customers continuously want to be impressed with extra features, enhanced quality of services, creative advertisement, faster delivery, and affordable prices and discounts.
Tech Solutions to Enhance Food Delivery Service
Imagine that customers want to use a food delivery service, no matter which company. The first point of contact, and one of the crucial ones, is creating an order. If an app doesn’t work quickly or its interface is not intuitive and user-friendly, it almost guarantees that a customer will say goodbye to this service, possibly forever. What do you do if you and your competitor’s apps provide the same features? How can you stay ahead?
1. Make the Ordering Process Easier and Engaging
A few pieces of advice make this process more exciting and convenient for customers to gain an edge over your competition:
- Take orders through social networks. Many customers will appreciate the ability to order their favorite pizzas in one click while browsing stories and articles.
- Provide customers with opportunities to make orders via different devices such as smartwatches, virtual assistants, and smart driving companions like Android Auto or CarPlay.
Give the ability to customize an order. Although this feature is simple, this is in great demand, and far from all delivery apps have this feature. However, it must be simple to use, or customers will neglect or not notice this feature.
2. Empower Your App with Extra Features
Big data, ML algorithms, VR, or AR can help enhance your delivery services, providing your app with new powerful features that make it much more efficient.
Let’s see a few examples:
Analyze road traffic to decrease the delivery time of your products. Implement GPS into your app to build the most optimal path in order for customers will get their order in time.
Analyze customer’s purchase history, see their preferences and offer new suggestions. You will know statistics about the most popular food from your menu and time of order. Find a skilled data scientist, analyst, and BI developer for data-driven positions in your menu. Also, due to sufficient data reports, you can predict increasing demand during rush hour and increase the number of couriers during this period. Don’t keep your customer waiting.
Automatically parse all reviews, comments, and any mentions about your company in posts on social networks. This allows you to see how people treat your services and what concerns they have, showing you what you should enhance to meet their expectations.
Use chatbots. This helps your managers deal with orders and attract new customers.
Use AR technology to give your customers’ new experiences and impressions. How a dish looks on the table, various promo activities, and gamification using AR has become more popular. It’s an exciting and memorable feature, and even if customers use it once, there’s a splendid chance that they will share it with friends or colleagues.
Use AI to prevent fraudulent attacks and save customers’ data, as well as your reputation and money.
3. Use New Delivery Methods
Last but not least is the delivery method. Possibly nothing will substitute the traditional bicycle or car-driving courier soon. Though let’s keep in mind innovative delivery methods are taking place. A few of the most famous examples of non-human couriers that exist:
- Amazon is developing and testing drone delivery services.
- Doordash has been testing a unique type of courier using six-wheeled robots rather than drones.
Delivery bots are more expensive toys that impress rather than a working tool for delivery services. Nowadays, robots and drones have many bottlenecks, such as no rules and regulations.
Overall
Technologies are being developed every day and keeping up with them is a different matter. From all points mentioned above, the most reliable is enhancing the customer experience. Analytics also deserves attention, as it helps delivery service better understand customer’s expectations and keep up with new trends.
