Build a Best-in-Class Order-Ahead and Pickup Journey

Please speak to the benefits of geofencing for restaurants. How can it enhance operational efficiency and customer experience?

Competition is at an all time high between restaurant chains, and customers are expecting excellent service no matter how they’re placing and receiving orders. With geofencing platforms like Radar (https://radar.com), restaurants can build best-in-class order-ahead and pickup journeys, increase app engagement and conversions with location-based messaging and marketing campaigns, and build location-aware experiences that augment the on-premise experience and drive greater engagement.  

What are some critical considerations when installing and implementing geofencing on site?

First, geofencing can be challenging to build and maintain in-house. Between iOS and Android updates, accuracy, battery efficiency, privacy, and security, it might take you thousands of engineering hours to stand up a geofencing solution, and then hundreds of hours annually to maintain it after that. We recommend buying a best-in-class geofencing platform like Radar instead of building geofencing yourself. Second, we suggest choosing an extensible, flexible platform. The world is dynamic, and your priorities might change from year to year: order-ahead and pickup one year, drive-thru the next year, loyalty the year after that, and so on. Choosing an extensible geofencing platform like Radar that supports all of these use cases and more will set you up for success today and in the future.

Please describe the order-ahead and pickup journey for customers when geofencing is involved.

You can implement order-ahead and pickup without geofencing and live ETAs, but it might be painful, both for your customers and for your staff. If a customer places a scheduled pickup order and you don't know their location, your staff won't know if the customer is running early or late and might not prepare the order at the optimal time. For your staff, this means operational challenges. For the customer, this means long wait times and cold food.

With geofencing and live ETAs, your staff will know the customer's exact arrival time, allowing them to prepare and bring out the order at the optimal time. This means operational efficiency, short wait times, and peak freshness.

Beyond a great customer experience in the moment, seamless location-aware order-ahead and pickup experiences also drive loyalty, setting you apart from your competitors and keeping your customers coming back again and again.

How can geofencing support location-based marketing initiatives?

Great marketing requires reaching your customer not only with the right message, but also at the right place and right time. Geofencing enables the latter.  With geofencing platforms like Radar, you can deliver more contextualized, compelling messages that are relevant to consumers and effectively drive engagement and conversions, includingompetitive campaigns, in-store promotions, customer loyalty campaigns, regional promotions, and more. Additionally, Radar integrates seamlessly with existing marketing tech stacks.

A common misconception is that geofencing requires background location permissions and inherent privacy risks. However, in-app messaging and on-premise experiences are possible to deliver with foreground permissions only, and privacy-conscious geofencing platforms like Radar allow you to minimize data collection and retention.

The smartest restaurant brands are taking advantage of location across the customer lifecycle, from on-premise experiences to location-based marketing to order ahead and pickup and more.