Many types of businesses can effectively leverage the personalized, streamlined experiences that mobile apps enable. A well-designed app should always outperform a website when it comes to helping customers browse, research, and buy.
How much of a return on investment an app produces will depend upon its slate of features. Apps need to account for the nature of businesses they are designed to serve if they are to be worth commissioning.
Restaurant operators need to be especially careful to make sure that the apps they pay for will include a range of fundamentally important features. Insist on the ten features that follow, and your restaurant app should be a hit.
1. Delivery
Whether because of concerns about COVID-19 or for other reasons, today’s restaurant patrons love delivery. Platforms like DataDreamers make it easy to add delivery-enabling features to restaurant apps of all kinds. Whatever happens with the global pandemic, demand for delivery is projected to grow rapidly well into the future. Delivery-oriented functionality should be considered a must for every restaurant app today.
2. Menus
Restaurants are infamous for hiding their tantalizing menus within PDF files on their websites. Mobile apps can easily put all this ever-important information on a clear, accessible display. Being able to update an app-hosted menu whenever the need arises will always be welcome, as well.
3. Notifications
Push notifications can be annoying, but they can also be informative and useful. The difference tends to be whether an app’s designers observed all the prevailing best practices when implementing a notification system. Although care should be taken to avoid alienating users, all restaurant apps should be able to generate customized notifications.
4. Discounts
Sometimes the best way to build up business at a restaurant is to advertise a special or discount. Mobile apps are perfect for this, as they can do so in a variety of ways. That still requires an app to be designed to support time-limited discounts and the like from the beginning.
5. Social Media
Restaurants can thrive or fail based on how well they stand out on social media. An app that integrates with popular services like Instagram and TikTok will make it much easier to build a following.
6. Reservations
There are few things in life more disappointing than being turned away from a favorite restaurant. Mobile app reservation systems keep longtime customers loyal and lessen the odds that first-timers will meet with frustration.
7. Options
Everyone uses software in different ways, and each app needs to account for this. A restaurant app that allows users to adjust text size or set up a personalized start screen will tend to make users happy.
8. Loyalty Programs
One of the best ways to help a restaurant succeed is to build up a base of loyal, recurring customers. In-app loyalty programs that provide benefits like free appetizers can go a long way toward the achievement of this goal.
9. Communication Tools
Being able to get in touch with a restaurant’s owner or managers can allow a disgruntled customer to resolve a problem before the urge to leave a nasty review becomes irresistible. Mobile apps that facilitate communication with a restaurant’s designated representatives can help rule out such problems and others.
10. Reviews and Feedback
Restaurants that feature plenty of reviews online tend to attract new diners more easily than others. Being able to easily assess the feedback that customers leave will allow any establishment’s leaders to make it even more successful. Mobile apps can encourage patrons to become more engaged in both of these important ways.
Mobile apps that include these ten features inevitably prove useful and valuable to restaurants that commission them. Making sure that any app a restaurant might consider will be just as capable will always be productive.
