Food and restaurant businesses have seen a steady rise of their food delivery business. The share of people that order food as compared to the ones eating in has sharply risen during the pandemic. Some coped better with this than others.

One common issue that we keep hearing from food business owners is that they have become very reliant to the large food delivery online services such as Foodpanda, Grab or LINE. These services take a cut from restaurant owners, up to a whopping 35% (approximately). On the other hand they have a massive scale so also provide the capability to give people new customers and more volume of orders. So while people do not like the at times extortionate fees, they are almost forced to use them as they provide the most convenient way to order food online.

Nevertheless, more and more food business and restaurant owners build out their own way of taking orders. The typical ways are to develop a website and ordering system or to use social media or messenger channels such as Facebook or LINE. Having a website solves this problem partly but its difficult to manage and setup an efficient checkout process that can compete with other systems.

The problem with this is that you need somebody who monitors all channels all the time and then processes it. Let’s take the example of Facebook, where a flow for an order might look like this:

• An inquiry comes in
• Customer asks for a menu
• You send him the menu or a link to the menu
• They check the menu and pick items (or maybe they decide different and order somewhere else)
• They then tell you what they want to order
• You take the order and calculate the total price and shipping if applicable
• You tell the customer the price and to make payment to your bank account, so you send them the bank details also
• Now you wait for the customer to pay
• After they paid they send you back a receipt for confirmation
• The the order is confirmed and cued up for processing

So you can see that this can be a very length process and with plenty of opportunity to drop off during this process. 

With Foxbot you are instantly able to provide a convenient way to take orders, show people all the items on the menu and prices,  show them any current promotions you might have, take their delivery details and address, have Foxbot calculate final prices, process payment, send a receipt to the customer, and have your order details formatted and sent to you for processing. All of this can happen inside a chat window without you or your staff lifting a finger.

This workflow can be customized and adapted to your needs in any way. Here are a few examples of other features possible:

• You could ask people for example to sign up to your newsletter inside the chat, or to follow your social media pages.
• You could keep customers in the loop by sending updates from your menu or promos to them automatically in specific intervals or on specific days/times.
• Are you using a CRM system already? No problem. Foxbot can likely connect with it, so the chatbot can send customer details to your CRM or other system so you can keep all data together.
• Foxbot can send SMS to your customers if they leave their mobile phone number. This can be used for receipts or order confirmations, but it can also be used for Marketing purposes. Sending can be automated 100%.