While people find it difficult and struggle to strike a balance between office and household chores, craving for food, and ordering food online is still in vogue. Giant delivery platforms such as Zomato and Swiggy have already tuned people to get instant service by providing faster food delivery. Amid this pandemic, where people are not stepping out of home, the restaurant business is on the brink of loss. The restaurants that strive to cut down costs, eliminate money spent on delivery apps, and serve the customers directly have opted to go for WhatsApp API.
Here are the 7 reasons why restaurants need to prefer WhatsApp ordering to serve their customers with ease and sail safely in these challenging times.
1. Penny Saved Is A Penny Earned
Home delivery and takeaways are the only method of survival for any restaurant business in this pandemic. People have already ditched the conventional way of ordering food i.e. visiting a fancy restaurant. Moreover, money spent on home delivery apps such as Swiggy and Zomato can also be saved by many restaurants by switching to Whatsapp business API. Can they invest in creating their own app? It may not be a good idea in these challenging times where a penny saved is a penny earned. Instead, they can switch to WhatsApp API to streamline their work and serve customers faster.
2. Insights about customer food preferences
In pre-covid times, when the food delivery business was controlled by third-party apps, restaurants had little control over the customers’ database. With WhatsApp Business API, home deliveries are made easy and restaurants can have deep insights about customer preferences. Accordingly, they can collect data and serve with top-notch service in near future based on the ordering history of each customer.
3. Easy Accessibility
Since WhatsApp is already being used by millions of people across the world, restaurants do not have to take the extra mile. Besides, people do not need to be guided about how to use an app. Irrespective of an operating system, phone space, technical knowledge, or age of the customer, anyone can go for a WhatsApp food order. Food can be ordered online at any location (office, home, or any other location) through any device with few clicks and expect a faster response from restaurants.
4. Conversational customer experience
In traditional ways, a menu of a restaurant is provided upon request with blurry pictures of food for customers. This led to confusion and a lack of clarity among customers. WhatsApp API for restaurants gives more room to explore by shooting menus faster than ever and they are coupled with high definition photos of each dish. Restaurants can automatically send menus in PDF format to a customer upon request without any manual intervention. Customers can scroll over photos of dishes, prices and decide accordingly. Besides, menus can also be configured and additions made as per discounts and location of customers.
5. No need for a website or restaurant app
Conventional food ordering involves many technical glitches and restrictions when a customer wants to order food at odd hours. It can be scrolling for a phone number of a particular restaurant or ordering food only during business hours. Customers had limited options to order food. On the other hand, WhatsApp Business API helps customers to have information at their fingertips. All they have to do is type a keyword and relevant details will be provided to them through WhatsApp chatbots.
6. One app, multiple purposes
What makes WhatsApp food ordering a big thing in this current scenario and also for the near future? It is popular among people, family members, and friends since everyone uses WhatsApp massively. The frustration and storage space issues on phones by installing countless food ordering apps can finally be eliminated by switching to simple yet effective WhatsApp. Few clicks and food orders can be placed with ease.
7. Retain existing customers through discount coupons
After a customer is done ordering a dish, his/her preference is recorded, and accordingly, discount coupons can be offered through WhatsApp. They can share the discount with their family or friends with just a click. Since existing customers are glued to the services of a restaurant, they will be more likely to order more in near future through WhatsApp. Through this strategy, the money spent on advertising can also be saved.
While some customers prefer a dine-in experience, others choose to have home delivery. Thus, brands need to be flexible while serving customers. Big food chains have already rolled up their sleeves to make the best use of WhatsApp as their primary communication channel while doing business with their customers.
Tata Starbucks launched its Starbucks India mobile application to take orders. Customers no longer have to wait in long and tiresome queues to get their Starbucks coffee. It makes the best use of WhatsApp ordering to let their customers find nearby stores, make payment with a click, and also look at working hours. On the other hand, all thanks to WhatsApp API, instant menus are being shared by another food chain ‘Wow! Momo’ to serve customers faster. They collaborated with Dotpe to provide online food delivery through WhatsApp. Customers can select their favorite food to get payment links and place orders successfully.
On the other hand, Burger King already rolled out its app coupled with a single WhatsApp number to meet the needs of its customers. Ever since the WhatsApp Business app was introduced in 2018, it helped several such brands to engage with customers with no middlemen or third-party apps.
Why prefer the expertise of Twerlo Connect?
Although WhatsApp ordering turned out to be the most significant breakthrough in the food industry, restaurants find it difficult to manage and adapt to this method. It can be quite overwhelming for restaurants as they have to manage a massive database of customers and respond to them with customized messages. They also need to hire chat agents to address queries or serve their customers with lightning speed. In such cases, restaurants can seek help from Twerlo connect. We, at Twerlo connect, help restaurants get verified business accounts and engage with customers by taking customer experience to another level. Restaurants can log into Twerlo connect a platform in order to gain insights about customer experience and database at each step of the food ordering journey. WhatsApp chatbots can send automated responses on behalf of restaurants to their customers when chat agents are away for lunch or on leave.
Twerlo connect also helps restaurants by offering WhatsApp template messages so that their customers can have interactions in real-time 24/7 without any spam. Moreover, a local support team is also provided so that restaurants can easily get connected with their customers by communicating in regional languages. With Twerlo connect, restaurants can add as many agents as they need without any worries. We also offer assistance through our dedicated account managers who are just a call or message away to manage accounts on behalf of restaurants. In these challenging times, we understand that pricing is an issue for each restaurant. Thus we provide top-notch service at affordable and flexible prices as per the needs of our clients i.e restaurants. Twerlo connect can handle a whopping 30 messages per second sent by customers. Be it quality or consistency of services, we leave no stone unturned by providing 99% availability at each point of the customer journey.
