We’re at Part 3 of How Syrve Works – our monthly spotlight on key product features helping operators to elevate performance levels. Last time out, we conducted a walkthrough of order injection – a powerful and increasingly critical tool for streamlining third party order integration.
This month we turn our attention to the wider subject of delivery management. Before we delve into the intricacies of Syrve’s game-changing solution, let’s start with the basics.
A food delivery management system allows restaurants and food service operators to manage all aspects of their delivery operations including order processing and payments, kitchen workflows, delivery routing, driver oversight and customer experience.
Many of the latest systems connect directly with the restaurant point-of-sale terminals (order injection) while integrating both in-house delivery services alongside third-party aggregators such as Uber Eats and Deliveroo. This, in a nutshell, describes Syrve’s delivery management system. So how does it all work?
Syrve Delivery covers all aspects of order management and includes order handling, e-commerce integrations, Caller ID integrations, driver tracking, customer SMS and order injection.
While the complete toolkit is exclusive to Enterprise users, operators on our Basic and Professional tiers still benefit from core delivery features, albeit on a more streamlined level. For the purpose of this walkthrough, we’ll be exploring Syrve’s complete delivery toolkit, showcasing what’s possible when everything is switched on.
Syrve Delivery is available to both independent restaurants and chain-wide operations. It features two central components: Syrve Delivery and Syrve Call Center.
Syrve Delivery – this is installed on an in-house restaurant server and is accessible when logging in to the Syrve POS. It allows you to manage all delivery orders, create invoices, manage order execution and ensure quality of service.
Syrve Call Centre – like Syrve Delivery, Call Centre allows for the management, monitoring and distribution of deliveries, either across a chain or multi-site network. Essentially, it’s a centralised system that’s available both at point of sale and via Syrve Office.
Syrve also features three additional applications to assist with things like website integration, driver- management and order processing. These are as follows:
Delivery Driver – the Delivery Driver app allows you to manage your delivery drivers, providing instant notifications about order fulfilment, delays and cancellations. It also calculates optimal routes via Google Maps and checks driver statuses in real time.
Syrve PBX – PBX speeds up order processing with the use of instant caller identification. Previous customer details are immediately pulled up including order history and pre-filled contact information.
The number of configurable options available within Syrve’s delivery management system is far too numerous to mention, even here. So, instead, we’ll now guide you through some of the most important and useful features.
To avoid misrouted orders and delivery zone mismatches, Syrve features Delivery City Refence Book and Zones databases.
The city reference book is aimed at chain restaurants and is extremely useful for outlets that deliver food to multiple cities.
Zones is used to hold address data that’s automatically displayed in order cards. These can easily be added via a simple dialogue box in which you can enter street and city names. The use of fixed address here, helps to avoid duplicate address names and manual input errors. It also helps to clearly define which areas your drivers cover.
Syrve allows you to set different delivery types per store. You can choose from delivery and collection, or delivery only and collection only. After selecting your delivery type, Syrve’s POS will display the corresponding button in its POS dashboard.
To speed up order processing, Syrve holds a database of previous delivery customers that includes things like contact details and payment preferences - colour-coded risk data is also included to indicate the reliability of a customer.
The database is fully searchable and includes filtering and grouping options. If a customer doesn’t exist on the system, the information entered into the search bar is used to populate a new customer entry.
Keeping customers in the loop about the progress of their orders is a must-have feature these days. And SMS notifications are one of the best ways to do this. To enable this feature, Syrve uses APIs to connect with most, if not all, SMS services.
All that’s required on your side is to register with our Loyalty module, choose an SMS provider and forward their details to our support team. Syrve already includes an SMS Notifications section that includes a list of sample communications.
Integrating a delivery service with your restaurant’s website, or with third-party delivery aggregators such as Deliveroo and UberEats, is performed with APIs. Setting these up is a relatively straightforward process that can be performed in-house or with the assistance of our support team.
Once set up, any new orders placed on your website or through an aggregator are automatically transferred to the point of production.
Delay forecasting is a critical feature, particularly during peak times. Providing customers with realistic expectations upfront is going to protect your reputation while allowing your staff to prepare orders in optimal sequence. To help, Syrve features an embedded delay prediction tool that estimates expected order delivery times according to kitchen workload, driver availability and traffic.
If Syrve detects a potential delivery delay when an order is first saved in the system, it will display a warning prompt along with a revised ETD and also ask the user if they want to adjust the delivery time accordingly.
So, we’ve looked at how Syrve Delivery works from a technical perspective, and highlighted some of its key features. But how does it all work in practice? Specifically, what does order handling look like from the coal face? Let’s start with call centre order processing.
Call centre order processing is managed via a single dashboard and is available through Syrve’s web-based app (separate license required) and back office. When a delivery order comes in, the operator forwards it to a production outlet where it’s processed and delivered.
In a typical scenario, once an order is received, the operator clicks ‘New Order’ and is presented with the ‘Order Creation’ screen. This contains the following four tabs which can be freely navigated should order details need to be changed.
Customer Tab - here, the operator searches for an existing customer to access contact information. If no information is present on the system, or a new customer can be created.
Address –the operator then navigates to the address tab to select delivery types, preferred delivery times and the pickup point.
Order – once the address tab is complete, the ordered items are chosen from an uploaded menu.
Checkout – checkout is the final tab in which payment types are set and discounts applied. When completed, the order is send to the selected store.
Syrve's POS for restaurant and food service operators allows for simple and straightforward delivery order processing. The cashier or POS operator clicks the ‘Delco’ button and is taken to a list of orders for delivery and collection, where they choose delivery type. Once selected, the operator takes the following steps to complete delivery.
Kitchen Workload – if enabled, the operator is presented with this screen once delivery or collection has been chosen – here, orders can be assigned based on kitchen capacity.
Customer and Delivery Details – if kitchen workload isn’t enabled, the order-taker is taken to this dashboard – existing customers can be searched for preexisting contact information or a new one registered on the system.
Order Items – the order items screen is accessed via the customer and delivery details dashboard – this is where discounts, bill-splitting and delivery time-frames are set and orders sent to the kitchen.
In addition to in-house processes, delivery management also extends to driver oversight. To ensure a seamless delivery service from order to fulfilment, Syrve features an advanced app that allows you to manage drivers with ease.
Available for individual outlets and chains, it sends instant notifications and updates about driver progress and automatically calculates optimal routes via GPS. At delivery-level, the driver receives instant alerts and messages about new deliveries and can check on which orders need to be prioritised.
To conclude Part 3 of How Syrve Works, it’s fair to say that Syrve’s Delivery Management system is one of the best-in-class platforms in the industry. It’s replete with tools and configurations that help to simplify and streamline food delivery, whether for in-house services, third-party aggregators or both.
We therefore invite you to learn more about what Syrve can offer your restaurant in one of the biggest growth areas in the F&B sector: https://www.syrve.com/en-gb/solution/front-of-house/restaurant-delivery-service-software