Advantages of a Digital Solution

Now, this being said, what are businesses actually looking for?

This question is relatively easy as most businesses have the same long term bottom line: increasing profits.

To achieve just that businesses try hard to:

1. Improve customer relation
• Get the best customer feedback on services or good sold as well as the business in general and the employees of the business.
• Support loyal customers, because not only are they good income, but also they are likely to be saying good stuff about your place and are likely to bring in new customers
• Drive sales through analytics (Eg: if many people look at a product but don't buy it, you can send a promotional push notification through in app messaging).
• Get detailed explanation about each one of your products and other customers opinion.
• Simplify the customer's ordering process for 2 main reasons
1. Quicker order = smaller line = higher throughput
2. Customers like having a choice and generally would rather not stand in line
• Omni-awarness of what is going on in the business so that you can interfere quickly (sometimes remotely) in case of need.
2. Manage inventory efficiently to minimize waste
3. Keep an eye on their staff's sales

All this can be managed through a mobile digital solution, often in the form of an app.

Digital solutions are not only great for increasing the pace of services and attracting new customers, but at least as important if not much more, there are ways to monitor your customer's activity on the app to understand what are the bottleneck of the business. Analytics driven through the mobile app can help you understand what is driving people away, what customers' opinions are and many more, this enables businesses to keep a certain control over their online image and react quickly when in need.

Ordering apps

In an ordering apps redundant features often involve white label design, paying, splitting bills, CMS, POS, these apps often just have ordering and hardly two features The problem always is what to chose, why, what are the applications cases. Personally I have my favorite app for ordering in bars, but I let you guess which one.

One of the main issues facing ordering mobile apps, is that their use has to be as ubiquitous as possible.
If people download an app for ordering in a business, but dos not actually have any use outside that business, the redundant problem seen is that people do not pick up the habit and therefor do not use the app regularly and generally forgets about it. A study shows 26% of apps downloaded in 2010 were used just once and this ratio has probably increased since then.
Thus if you launch an app for ordering, do not only make sure the UI is pleasant, but make sure there is enough business that use it in a same are so that the app does not get relegated as an app just using up your phone memory.
Bypass Lane kind of turned the problem around and is trying to get into every sports stadium out there. This is a really interesting move as sports fans are generally amongst the most loyal people out there.
So if they are able to make fans assimilate ordering in my stadium through that app it will be very hard for anyone after that to take over this "loyal market".

Piece of advice for those trying to get their ordering app out: focus on a specific region, focus on density of businesses rather than taking over the world, your app survival depends on the customer making a habit of using it.

Ordering Apps

COMPETITOR

ORDERING

PAYING

APP DESIGN

SPLITTING BILS

CMS

POS

POS integration

Ckeck-in

See friends

Pay drink to friend

Coupon/loyalty

Marketing tools

Bareye

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

BuzzTheBar/Preo

X

X

X

Printer

Bypass Lane

X

X

X

ChowNow

X

X

X

X

X

Tablet

X

Clipp

X

X

X

Tablet

X

X

Coaster

X

X

X

Tablet

Dine and Dash

X

X

X

X

?

Drinkpass

X

X

X

X

X

X

Flowtab

X

X

iMenutogo

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

Mojobistro

X

X

X

X

X

X

MyCheck US

X

X

X

X

X

OpenDining

X

X

X

X

X

X

Preo / BuzzTheBar

X

X

X

Printer

Silent Order

X

X

X

X

Snapfingers

X

X

X

X

Square Wallet

X

X

X

X

X

X

Storific

x

x

X

TabbedOut

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

TouchLife Drink Ordering

X

X

A big problem businesses are facing with ordering apps as well as loyalty programs often is the fact that the advertisement generally is provided by the businesses using the app.

This has an inherent flaw for a wide adoption because many businesses feel that they are advertising for the third party app to customers who are already in the store, thus they were ready to pay the business directly, but now they download the app to make the order or get the rewards points and the business providing the sale sees the third party app take commissions on sales that would of happened anyway.

Loyalty Programs

All size businesses strive to reach out to customers and maintain their base. Unfortunately for them, this is a very broken down industry where in the digital age, many players strive to get a piece of the cake. There are many apps that enable businesses with loyalty programs, such as:

Loyalty programs

Generic		Industry Specific	Brand focus
Belly	KeyRing	BuzzTable	My Coffee Card
Loyalblocks	RewardJunkie	OpenTable
NextBee	LevelUp	LoyaltyGator
Perka	RewardLoop
RewardLoop	Punchcard
Pirq	MintM
SpotOn	PunchTab
Mytime.com

That is just to mention a few app focused companies in the loyalty program field but there are still a lot of other players who are not necessarily focusing on mobile apps as well, such as BigDoor, Neroya

Including many companies in the Customer Loyalty industry who have dropped out like (deelioz.com, StiQRd.com, or many others)

According to a research by the firm firm BIA/Kelsey: "More than a third of small businesses (38 percent) use customer loyalty programs as part of their marketing strategy to drum up repeat business [...] Another 21 percent said that they were likely to adopt a customer loyalty program in the next 12 months."

POS (r)evolution

Here is an short video from the BBC about Erply one of the mentioned point of sale (POS), they are all trying to disrupt the ordinary POS.

POSs

AasaanPay	HybridPOS	Revel
AmburPOS	Hiboutik (Free POS software)	ShopKeep
AirPos	ISISPOS	Shopify
BreadcrumbPOS	Lavu	Square stand
CashierLive	Leaf	SumUp
Clover	Leapset	TruePOS
Reply	LightSpeedRetail	VendHQ
GoFrugal	Pose	ZingCheckout

All these are jut a few of the wider number of POS solutions offered out there. I guess, most important to businesses, are the features that enhance the standard offering of POSs which in over 30% of stores today still is a simple cash register. Today POSs are being replaced by a whole in one Cash Register, Inventory Management, Financial & Accounting Support, Remote Mobile Access, Loyalty and Couponing Programs, Marketing & Community Management Tools, Offline Support and many more enhancements options. It's really difficult to chose the right one for your business needs and have your staff keep up with it. But I really believe that once you adapt to a wisely selected POS system for your business, your metrics goes through the roof!

State of the industry

In the digital age, it has been very difficult for businesses to adapt their technology.

Firstly, most businesses a couple years ago hardly used technology at all to keep their customers engaged and to try to increase their market reach/share. Today many third party companies have specialized to offer businesses generic programs or slightly customizable programs. The main problem, is that existing digital solutions have specialized in small niches of customer  relation programs. Solutions are either loyalty programs, customer service efficiency enhancers, couponing systems rating and reviewing services, etc. It is very difficult today for a business to pick and chose his customer relation strategy depending on the offering of a 3rd party app/system.

Most of those solutions are compiled and not customizable at all to the business. Ie, the business needs to adapt it's strategy to the app's features, rather than the logical other way around. Apps should be tailored specifically to suit a business's strategic needs.

Also another major issue facing businesses is that a lot of the proposed solutions do not integrate with your point of sale, or requires you to use their POS often in the form of an app you generally load on a tablet.
The problem is that unless you totally replace the existing POS, or integrate perfectly with their existing POS, the business will probably have to manage two separate accounts/sources for their business accounting, manage stock separately and most of the time make all their business information available to third parties.

Some businesses have begun hiring developers to develop an in-house solution to their business, this generally is expensive and therefor only affordable to very successful businesses or larger chains.

This unfortunately for small businesses drives higher customer relations levels for businesses who financially need it the less.

SME are generally those facing the biggest problem to get their message out, to attract new customers and drive customer engagement.

This is why we believe the company that will be able to turn around the current offering to make sure SMEs get an app tailored to their business  is likely to gain a lot of traction with businesses who want to pick and customize their offerings.