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November 11, 2024
Outsourcing tasks like phone ordering, delivery, and marketing can streamline operations, cut costs, and boost profits, allowing restaurants to focus on service quality while improving efficiency and customer satisfaction.
When you hear about restaurant outsourcing, it can be intimidating to think about handing over to another company a core responsibility like phone ordering. You already do most everything by yourself, and it seems easier to just do things the way they’ve always been. But stop and think about it for a moment.
The amount of stress, employee turnover, and missed phone calls you experience should tell you one thing: the same process isn’t going to work forever. You will burn out, miss profits, and constantly struggle.
If you want to eliminate stress, find and keep the right team members, and increase sales, you need to change. When you improve your restaurant operations, everyone is happy. Your team no longer feels overwhelmed, and your customers have better experiences. Isn’t that what everyone wants?
Outsourcing is a great way to shift from doing everything yourself and constantly running around to experiencing smooth-sailing restaurant operations. You can make more sales while still having control over the customer experience. Learn how to outsource your phone order and delivery system while maintaining quality—and see why so many restaurants are doing it.
Restaurant outsourcing is when you delegate certain tasks, such as taking phone orders, to a partner service that does it for you.
Using Tarro, for example, is a way to outsource phone ordering, delivery, and marketing so restaurant operators and their teams can focus on their daily tasks without burnout.
Outsourcing can reduce labor costs, improve operational efficiency, and help managers and teams minimize stress.
When restaurants outsource phone orders, there’s no worry about finding staff with high English proficiency to answer calls—a trained team handles it. For that reason alone, restaurant staffing for other roles gets easier. And since employees don’t have to juggle phone orders while serving customers in-house simultaneously, restaurants also retain employees longer, decrease painful no-shows, and provide a better dining experience.
Every restaurant and outsource service is different, but the key is verifying that you get a positive return on investment (ROI). If you can increase profits, customer satisfaction, and employee retention, then the service is worth it. A high-quality service should be able to tailor the program based on your needs and budget.
Many answering services implement fees of up to about 20% of revenue. Fortunately, there are restaurant outsourcing services like Tarro that don’t charge until they process an order (and are much more affordable).
Let’s say a customer calls in to order from your restaurant, and an agent from Tarro picks up. The agent answers the customer’s questions, takes the order, and then sends it directly to you. Since Tarro succeeds only when you land that sale, this is the only time you pay. It’s a cost-effective process with a built-in guarantee to make your investment worthwhile. A great service provider like Tarro will help you increase orders so you make more sales and see a greater return on your investment.
Where should you start if outsourcing can save you money, increase sales, and take away the pressure? Think of the high-stress and demanding everyday tasks you handle at your restaurant. If you can outsource just one (or all) of the following operations, you’ll run a restaurant you can thrive in.
Four people are in line waiting to order.
The chef has receipts taped across the length of the shelf.
In the middle of the rush, phone calls are coming in nonstop.
Every missed call is a missed sale. And anytime your employees have to stop and answer the phone, the in-restaurant customer experience level will not meet your standards—it’s impossible when there are seven other things going on.
Instead, you can capture every phone order accurately, leading to greater customer satisfaction.
Outsourced phone ordering involves a dedicated team that can take an order, walk the customer through the menu to add any customizations, and send the order straight to your kitchen and front-of-house staff.
Partners like Tarro use AI so their teams can pick up multiple calls simultaneously on the same line and send orders straight to you 24/7, 365 days a year. The representatives achieve a 99.5% accuracy rate and can speak fluently in English and Spanish.
This will reduce stress, and you’ll receive more orders when representatives answer calls in three seconds or less—all with high order accuracy. Over time, customers will identify your restaurant as an easy-to-order option and choose yours over other restaurants.
Many restaurants are already outsourcing delivery with third-party apps. The problem is that delivery is out of your control, and the experiences and profit margins all vary. Plus, these third-party apps charge high commissions of up to 25% or 30% of per sale. In addition to those fees, some even increase your menu prices and keep the difference. Those realities usually work against you.
The best option is to outsource delivery service. You choose a partner, and they handle it. Then, your customers get a consistent, professional experience while you get a better profit margin without having to pay several other go-between apps.
For example, when callers order from a restaurant, a partner like Tarro takes the order and sends a delivery driver to your counter. They pick up the order and take it to the customer. You don’t have to worry about taking the phone order or sending a driver to deliver it.
In-house delivery is an often untapped revenue stream for small-business restaurants. You can take advantage of this new process to increase sales for a better profit if you don’t already offer delivery or only do it with a few third-party apps like Uber Eats.
As a restaurant owner, you want to think forward, not backward.
You want to grow your business instead of figuring out where the money went last week. If you outsource your accounting and bookkeeping, you can save yourself hours of work in the back office.
Not only does outsourcing financial tasks save you time and relieve stress, but it also helps you become more organized. A dedicated professional can offer top-quality expertise, so you know where every dollar went and where every dollar should go. A certified accounting expert, CPA, or tax consultant can also offer advice.
Make sure you choose someone who has experience in the food service industry to get the most benefit.
You’re busy serving customers and making great food. You can create a website using WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, Webflow, and other platforms, but the last thing you want to do is stop and sit down to edit and maintain your website. And that’s if you know a thing or two about tech. If not, figuring out each task will take ten times as long.
Instead, you can hire a website management professional to make necessary updates to your site to ensure it has the latest security, information, and a pleasant user interface for a positive customer experience.
You can contact a website management professional to take care of this task whenever you update your menu or need to include a change to your website. There are plenty of places to find professionals:
Your website is the online version of your restaurant, so you want to make sure someone is putting as much care and attention into it as you do to your physical location. You can also invest in local search engine optimization (SEO) so that when your customer base searches for your cuisine, your business and address appear.
Your website can contain:
You can’t underestimate the importance of a quality website, and it’s not an option to ignore search engines. In fact, 62% of customers search for food options on Google before ordering from a restaurant.
Food prep can take a lot of time, and certain dishes, like egg rolls and dumplings, can take considerable skill to create. When you turn over the creation of certain dishes to outsourcing companies, you can save labor costs. You also don’t have to worry about having that extra person prepping the dishes or training them to do it right.
When you want to outsource food production, quality is key. You want to make sure the food you outsource meets the same standards as the dishes and sides you make in-house. It’s best to find out where other restaurants source their food and taste-test their offerings to see if the convenience and cost savings are worth it compared to keeping the preparation in-house.
Business owners work hard to create an A+ customer experience. The last thing they should have to worry about is whether customers will order tomorrow.
Outsourcing marketing helps create sustainable and consistent growth.
A partner like Tarro leads your SMS (text message) and print marketing. Customers can get text messages about deals, events, and new dishes
When you can rest easy knowing that a full-service team is generating business, it’s much easier to focus on your team, restaurant, and customers—all while increasing sales.
Taking Las Vegas neighborhoods by storm, China A Gogo is on track to being the most prominent Chinese chain in the United States. Although the establishment is 20 years old, it has grown to 30 stores and counting in recent years.
Owen, the restaurant owner, sees Panda Express as its most significant competitor. However, the restaurant’s ambitious growth started with humble beginnings. When Owen wanted to grow from a single restaurant to one with multiple locations—in a way that didn’t lead to burnout—he needed a plan.
The chain would need to set itself apart from Panda Express by focusing on higher-quality food. Also, the restaurant would make dishes fresh to order. But to make all this work, Owen needed a way to outsource and streamline operations.
One issue was high labor costs, plus needing help finding the right people and taking orders. Owen tackled all those barriers to success by adopting a phone answering service.
Before, phone orders took about a fourth to a third of the order volume and required two employees to answer phones. It was too much. But by adopting a phone ordering service, Owen didn’t have to worry about it. Customers could call, place their orders, and have a positive, consistent customer experience.
Because Owen outsourced and streamlined operations, he can continue to grow without limits—and all without the stress and pressure of the single restaurant he had before.
When you choose an outsourcing solution, there’s one thing you want to verify above all: is it a service or a partner?
These two differences can change the future of your company.
A service sees you as a client.
A partner sees your success as their success.
Tarro is a partner, a solution designed for the restaurant industry by restaurant workers.
We know what you’re going through and what it takes to get the pressure off your shoulders, increase sales, and help you grow.
With Tarro, you can outsource your phone orders, deliveries, and marketing. You can outsource all of those areas or just one, like phone ordering. You can tailor your plan, and you only pay when Tarro processes a call order.
When customers order, they speak to a representative who intimately knows your menu. If the caller needs help understanding a menu item or wants to change an ingredient, it’s easy—and they get their order with 99.5% accuracy.
Book a call today to see how Tarro can streamline your restaurant business for worry-free growth, happy employees and customers, and higher order accuracy.
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