An online food ordering concept is gaining immense popularity among both restaurants and customers. 95% of restaurant owners agree that the implementation of technology improves business efficiency. More and more food businesses have joined the race and raised the competition to stratospheric levels to embrace the massive potential of the market.
Food tech companies are increasingly turning to the trusted ally: Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology.
The fact that today’s customers are very choosy and to address their demands and expectations, the online food industry is leveraging the power of these technologies.
AI and Machine Learning seem to be ubiquitous in the online food ordering market. Have you explored them yet? If not, here’s a chance to gauge its benefits:
Optimize Delivery Time
Customers of online food deliveries aren’t just affected by the food quality but also the time it takes to deliver their orders. One of the critical challenges for online food delivery businesses is the dispatch of a delivery partner to pick up order items in time.
Think about an instance of what good the food is – no matter how deliciously cooked if it fails to reach consumers on time. So, punctuality is a pivotal factor for any online food delivery company. The popularity of these companies depends on how faster it delivers the order.
AI and ML help to collect real-time data about traffic flow, routes, weather, a destination address, and more to determine the quickest way and strategy to ensure the earliest food delivery of orders by avoiding possible obstacles.
Enhanced Customer Relationship
The rapid surge of AI and ML in the online food delivery industry has contributed enormously to Chatbots’ increasing popularity. The restaurants are using virtual assistants to provide more personalized and enhance customer ordering experience.
The chatbots are available 24/7 to provide customer support by engaging clients and consumers with relevant information based on their questions/queries.
Identify High-value Customers
The success of any business depends on the customers that bring the most value. However, it can be quite challenging to categorize your high-value customers. AI and Machine Learning technologies enable business owners to alleviate that problem by providing holistic insights about the target customer base, ideal buyers, and more. It also helps predict prospective customers based on behavior and attributes analysis of the existing customers.
Increased Personalization
Today’s customers are looking for an advanced way to order food rather than spend time researching to decide where to order food items or what food to buy. AI and ML offer personalization based on customer profiles by serving the right food items at the right time. Food delivery apps enable customers to choose their most favorites dishes with suggested recommendations.
Data such as location, interests, purchase history, and other metrics are continuously collected to send personalized suggestions to individual users. For instance, by examining consumer analytics, online food service businesses can predict customer preferences. It includes the type of food, the quantity of food, time of day, location from where a consumer is likely to order, and more with higher accuracy. Such patterns of consumer behaviors can help understand where food delivery agents should be deployed and what time they should expect to be busiest.
Discover Relevant Trends
Any business must understand the prevalent market trends and leverage its potential to enhance growth. Similarly, it holds for online food delivery companies as well. AI and Machine Learning technology enable businesses to explore relevant market trends. They identify ideal ways to utilize it for business growth.
Automated Workflows
The leading online food delivery businesses have started implementing Artificial Intelligence and ML to redesign their workflows and improve operations efficiency.
Inventory Management
Manual inventory management of food items is a tedious task and poor management of inventory results in a stock outage, waste of products, and pricing errors. However, leaving inventory management to Artificial Intelligence technology saves time and wastage of products by delivering accurate outputs.
AI uses Machine Learning and visual recognition technologies to examine the food items that are out of stock, outdated, damaged or expired, and out-of-season. It sends real-time notifications to the in-charge personnel to recognize and take immediate action.
Effective Search Results
The online food delivery app consists of varied options, including restaurants, cafes, bars, and more, which are heavily dependent on their ratings and feedback on social sites. AI in an online food delivery app provides the user a hint for a restaurant or café from a nearby location. It is likely to appeal to their taste by deriving the preferences from the available database.
Predicting Food Trends
AI and ML provide up-to-date food industry insights, predictions, and emerging food trends based on billions of data analysis. It enables food delivery companies to adapt and capitalize on the new flavors/ ingredients that are most desired by the customers and successfully meet the trending needs.
Estimate Delivery Time
The use of Machine Learning in the online food delivery industry enables businesses to quantify the time spent on past deliveries. On the basis that it forecasts the time that would be paid to perform future deliveries.
Voice Searches
Around 27% of the global online population prefer using voice search rather than typing on their own. Voice search seems to gain more significance amongst consumers seeking information about a restaurant and ordering food.
Food businesses can create tools such as Amazon Alexa to enable their customers to order from anywhere without even lifting a finger instantly.
Conclusion
The unparalleled expertise and skill that AI and Machine Learning offers to online food businesses are already moving the industry to a new level. It leads to less human errors, reduced waste of food products, and lower costs for storage/transportation, thereby gaining happier customers with quick and effective services.
Further, the technology helps transform the way consumers use online services to order food. And, it becomes of utmost necessity for online food delivery companies to understand customer needs, identify the dents, and bridge gaps. The combination of Artificial Intelligence and ML is driving real innovation, so be sure not to think twice before leveraging them in your business.
Woman using laptop to order food -DepositPhotos
