Countless restaurants turn to third-party services, such as delivery and catering apps, to pump up their bottom lines, adding as much as 20 percent in incremental sales. While the steady stream of online orders is indispensable to many businesses, it can be overwhelming when each third-party service comes with its own hard-to-master software system and tablet. When you’re juggling tablets and punching orders manually into your POS system, it can be a time suck. But integration platforms simplify the process and enable restaurants to be even more productive and cut labor costs. To find out how, we spoke with Sterling Douglass, CEO of Chowly, a company whose POS integration platform helps restaurants create such efficiencies.

1. Improve Order Accuracy 

In a restaurant, slipups happen. Especially when large and complex online orders (no sauce, gluten-free, buffet set-up…) are entered into the POS system by hand. Touch the wrong buttons and the tiniest mistake can trip up the kitchen, create food waste, and impact customer satisfaction. Plus, once the food leaves the restaurant, bulk delivery orders can be practically impossible to correct on the fly. And if the destination address is entered incorrectly and the driver has to reroute, food quality is bound to suffer.

But integration platforms like Chowly can help you tackle order accuracy head-on. An integration platform:

• Eliminates the need to manually enter online orders into your POS system
• Automatically sends all third-party orders straight to your POS system
• Routes orders to the kitchen printer with all modifiers and notes
• Reduces waste due to data-entry errors

“No more forgetting special order details, no more misspelled names, no more challenging operators to figure out every third-party platform,” says Sterling Douglass. “It also eliminates having order tablets for each third-party delivery service at the restaurant. Chowly works in the background without any additional screens. You don’t see us.”

2. Reduce Labor Costs

Get more delivery and catering orders without spending money on extra labor. That’s what Jet’s Pizza, an early Chowly client, did. Prior to using Chowly, a single Jet’s store received 1,500 orders every month through third parties—and paid as many as four workers to enter those orders by hand. But after streamlining its process for accepting online orders, the Jet’s store was able to lower labor costs and ramp up delivery by partnering with an additional third party. Orders gradually doubled to 3,000 per month. “We saved them $800 in labor each month,” Douglass says. “That’s a pretty good ROI on the $100 it costs that store every month to subscribe to Chowly.”

3. Simplify Equipment (Bye-Bye, Tablets)

Using multiple tablets to wrangle orders and reports from different third-party delivery and catering platforms can be a chore. Fortunately, integration platforms make it possible to throw out those tablets and simplify your operations.

“Once that [third-party] partner is integrated and those orders are flowing directly to the POS system, the tablets go away,” Sterling Douglass explains. “And when you add partners, instead of adding another tablet, they’re integrated into the system. This makes life simpler for restaurants, and operators are more accepting of new technology like this when they see how easy it can be.”

4. Grow Sales

The booming off-premises market can be a game-changer for restaurants. In fact, according to a study by Technomic and the National Restaurant Association, those orders now make up 58 percent of restaurant occasions and that number is expected to grow.

But in order to grab your market share, you need to invest in new technology, according to the researchers. That’s because a lot of customers use technology to order food: 41 percent order delivery through third-party apps and 37 percent rely on third-party websites. Leveraging new technology is so important for restaurants that the researchers flagged this course of action as a “critical enabler of growing off-premises sales” and advised that operators “must adapt to meet consumer demand.”

With the help of integration platforms like Chowly, restaurants can have another source of business without tangling up workflows with multiple tablets or paying for extra labor costs. By simplifying the process, integration platforms can help restaurants save time and resources for the more important stuff and get a bigger payoff.

Are you ready to grow your business by streamlining your system? Visit Chowly for more information.