The Future of Daily Deals
Groupon appears well-situated for growth, and the company's long-term strategy involves offering POS services and apps that integrate daily deals and give restaurants the ability to offer instant deals, based on real-time business. The company is developing a POS system with Breadcrumb that includes credit-card swiper, cash drawer and wireless access. Other Groupon initiatives include
The company purchase Savored to give it the ability to reserve tables at more than 25,000 restaurants in 28 states.
The Gnome, a tablet-based ordering system, allows restaurant staff to track cash, redeem coupons, handle credit and debit transactions and integrate with accounting and marketing software.
Breadcrumb's POS system will
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The learning curve could provide enough information and feedback so that you could craft more effective deals in the future. You can determine the optimum number of vouchers to sell and put better limits in place to prevent losing money on food costs.
Read the Fine Print
You need to craft your offer so that you can afford to receive 23 percent on the dollar for a certain number of redemptions in any given service period. Remember that you might have other coupons coming in from various marketing promotions, so craft your offers to prevent excessive coupon redemptions.
You should plan your offer in such a way to get the best possible response from new customers. This includes offering a Groupon deal on an expensive tasting meal where customers get a taste of each of several entreés or including a wine or cocktail tasting event for a party of several customers. Avoid letting Groupon set too many of the offer’s details because you could end up with a dining room full of Groupon users who're just trying to save money. Limit Groupon and other promotional offers to different redemption periods to prevent ending up with "all-coupon"
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The idea here is to upsell people and get them to return. Unfortunately, some Groupon users might be poor tippers because they're coupon-cutters. Overwhelmed staff might easily treat these customers as second-class citizens, nuisances and one-off visitors. People who aren't respected and treated poorly certainly have no incentive to return, no matter how good the food.
Even if your staff performs like the champions that they usually are, an influx of customers could slow service to regular customers or create a different dining environment. That's why it's essential to troubleshoot any customer-service issues quickly. Your staff can't neglect either the Groupon users or their regular customers. After selling hundreds of deals, restaurants should prepare for an upswell in business on the same day, the next day and the first weekend after the deal by scheduling extra staff or having workers on-call to deal with the extra business.
Concluding Thoughts
Careful number crunching and using Groupon selectively can be quite effective, but the process takes some detailed