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SocialEpoch: Changing The Future Of Food and Restaurant Industry

What do you do when you crave a dish from your favorite restaurant?

You pick your phone, order your food and get it delivered to your doorstep!

We live in a time where food and restaurant industryhas seen drastic digital shift and customers don’t need to go to restaurants. Instead, restaurants need to come to customers to run their business. With more and more businesses coming online and providing home delivery, businesses need to use every trick at hand to make sure, they do not miss out on their customers. Here is a quick review of the changing trends in food and restaurant industry.

Food and Restaurant Industry: Then v/s Now

For decades, having dinner at a restaurant with a soothing ambiance and great food was a luxury experience. Customers were happy to wait in queues for hours just to get a table at their eatery. But lately, the food and restaurant industry is changing. With home-deliveries becoming a thing, customers no longer want to take the effort of going to a restaurant when they can enjoy the same meal at home.

With most home deliveries promising a 30-minute delivery commitment, it offers customers a lucrative option,  while it makes it more challenging for restaurant owners to meet customer service excellence. Earlier, restaurants had the upper hand as they had a loyal customer base. But in current times, it’s the customers who have the upper hand. 

With more and more restaurants offering home delivery services, the customers have more options to choose from and customer loyalty has reduced. 

As the latest development, Zomato, Swiggy, and UberEats, and a dozen other food delivery platforms are accelerating the trend of online-food delivery, which leaves restaurants no options but to jump into the wagon.

But, with online-food delivery, how can your food business survive the cut-throat competition from fellow restaurants and maintain a healthy customer base?

How SocialEpoch can help the food business earn a loyal customer base

Here are 10 ways SocialEpoch can help your food business gain loyal customers and stay ahead with your online marketing.

1. Personalized notification

Restaurant and Food Industry: Notification

In order to cut competition and stay ahead of the race, you need to offer your customers exactly what they want and more. 

Using SocialEpoch, you can send personalized offers and notifications based regularly on their order history. This will not only increase your sale but will also help you build an impression among your customers and convert them into regular customers.

Creative and catchy notifications can keep your customers entertained and help build a unique identity for your business.

For example “Monday blues giving you a scare? Worry not, coz our exciting new menu is there for your rescue.”

2. One to one conversation

Food and Restaurant Industry:Personal conversation

With SocialEpoch, you can have a personal one-to-one conversation with your customers to learn about their likes and dislikes using WhatsApp. Since most people are already on WhatsApp, your customers need not take any extra effort to reach out to you. 

You can take orders, get customization requests and collect payments, all at the same place.

By giving a touch of personalization and keeping your customer’s preference a priority, you can win loyal customers and a positive image in no time.

For example, “Hey Mike, we know that you love chicken wings. Here is a special offer on Chicken wings, just for you!”

3. Quick response

Food and Restaurant Industry: Instant Response

One thing that everyone hates is waiting for a response. And it’s worse when the person happens to be your customer. Keeping a customer waiting for a response can leave a very bad impact and increase your chances of losing them. 

But with SocialEpoch’s Quick response feature, you can ensure that every customer message is attended to immediately, even if it’s the rush hour and you have dozens of messages coming in. 

For example, you can create a quick reply template such as “Hi! Welcome to Flaming Grills! What would be your order for today?”

4. Buyer persona

Food and Restaurant Industry: Buyer Persona

Once you collect all necessary customer data, you can create a buyer persona. You can use the buyer persona to plan your personalized ad and notifications and win them over. A buyer persona can also be used in data analytics.

SocialEpoch lets you create and customize buyer persona for each contact upto the most granular level of details. This can help you know and understand your customers closely and hence serve them better.

5. Multilingual support

 Multilingual support

Customers never fail to appreciate any effort made to make them feel special. SocialEpoch’s multilingual feature allows you to send messages to your customer in their native language. You simply have to select the target language for the particular contact. 

This will ensure that language never becomes a hurdle in your excellent customer service.

You can also set a particular language for yourself and all incoming messages will be automatically converted into it.

6. Labels

Labels

Managing a large contact list doesn’t always have to be a hassle, at least not with SocialEpoch. The label feature allows you to create custom labels for each contact. 

Labels can help you categorize each of your contacts and make it a lot easier to take your conversations ahead.

For example, you can label your customers as a new customer, regular customer, occasional customer, or even based on their favorite menu item.

7. Bulk sender

Bulk sender

The bulk sender feature can be really useful if you need to send a message or notifications to a large number of customers. With SocialEpoch, you can send messages to any number of contacts.

The best part is, you don’t even need to have the number saved into your contacts. You can import the contact list from another source in .xls or .csv format and send messages to all of them with just a click.

8. Smart Chatbots

Smart Chatbots

If you do not wish to handle customer queries personally, you can use SocialEpoch enabled chatbot instead. The smart chatbot can be used to send notifications, chat with customers and even respond to customer queries.

Chatbots can be used to handle customer service-related issues so that customers can get suitable responses immediately without you being personally involved with it.

9. Task management

Task management

SocialEpoch is suitable not just for small businesses but also for large restaurants with thousands of customers on a daily basis. SocialEpoch’s Task management feature allows you to delegate chats to team members or staff so that they can handle it personally.

This CRM feature can be a huge advantage for large food chains as they can extend effective customer services. 

10. Visualized Data Board

Visualized Data Board

Keeping an eye on sales and inventory on a daily basis is essential for any food business. 

With SocialEpoch, you can keep track of your daily sales and get a clear picture of marketing and sales numbers with the help of visualized data boards. These data analytics can help plan sales strategy, inventory requirements, and more for you. 

So, this was how SocialEpoch can be a real game-changer for restaurant owners and prove to be the future of the food industry. If you too are into the food industry and want to get SocialEpoch for your business too, head to our contact us page to talk to our executive. You can also explore its other features and services here.