There’s a whole lot of tech nowadays promising to help restaurants manage a whole bunch of tasks: delivery apps, POS systems, getting apps to talk to the POS system, back-of-house inventory, employees schedules, customers wanting more personalization. The list could realistically fill an 800 word post and still not be complete.
Little wonder, then, that an increasingly popular tech solution to the restaurant tech barrage is the all-in-one SaaS platform — that is software that streamlines both front- and back-of-house tasks and operations into a single system that lives in the cloud and that restaurants access via a single interface.
The latest of these to hit the U.S. is LimeTray, a company based out of India who’s presence is already well established in its home country as well as the UK, the UAE, and South Africa.
According to a recent press announcement, for its U.S. venture, the LimeTray system divvies its products and capabilities into three distinct buckets:
- Discovery offers tools to improve and manage online ordering, mobile apps, and website upkeep.
- Engagement focuses on loyalty and rewards programs, as well as other initiatives that improve and retain customer relationships.
- Analytics uses software to make sense of the the data these many tech-driven tools and activities produce.
LimeTray also integrates with a handful of third party products and services, including those from Google, India-based delivery service foodpanda, and online payments company Razorpay, among others.
Plenty of other solutions like LimeTray exist right now the U.S. restaurant scene, from Olo to Square to Toast, who seems bent on taking over every last molecule of the restaurant management process.
While there are slight variations from one system to another, they all tout the following benefit: by digitizing and automating much of the day-to-day work at the restaurant, they’re freeing up operators’ time to focus on customer service and experience.
For now, LimeTray, which was founded in 2013 by Akhilesh Bali and Piyush Jain, seems especially focused on the customer engagement and retention aspect of restaurant management. The company website notes that 6 in 10 restaurants shut down less than a year after starting not because of they fail to reach and retain enough customers. Those numbers are backed up by an oft-cited Ohio State University study that found 60 percent of restaurants fail within the first year, and that poor customer service is a key reason for those closings.
Tech solutions from LimeTray and others offer two ways to tackle this problem. The first is with that aforementioned benefit of freeing up restaurant owners’ and operators’ time to actually focus on the hospitality aspect of the business. The second is data, which can help restaurants find out more about customer preferences, praises, and complaints, as well as flag any worrying patterns, like repeatedly comping checks. And as co-founder Akhilesh noted in the recent press release, there’s room for growth in this area: “Further machine learning and data tech would change how these restaurants acquire and retain customers. These are exciting times for us, and we look forward to what comes next.”
With the U.S. markets, LimeTray now serves over 4,500 restaurants, including names like Burger King, California Pizza Kitchen, and Krispy Kreme. and has to date raised two funding rounds with Matrix and JSW Ventures (further details of the rounds are undisclosed).
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