We live in a fast-paced digital world where people aren’t willing to wait long, even for delicious food. The time it takes for catering companies to deliver food is just as important as the quality of the food. As a result, lead times have become an incredibly important factor for the success of catering businesses.
Lowering your catering lead times can help you service more customers and improve overall customer satisfaction as well. And reduced catering lead times are a fantastic way to receive more orders and boost your revenues.
Here’s how lowering catering lead times can increase your sales and make more money:
Grab more customers
Less lead time = More served customers. The maths is just as simple as that.
For instance, if your lead time for bulk orders is more than 2 days, and a customer is looking for a caterer for a last-minute surprise party, they wouldn’t even contact you knowing your lead times. By decreasing your lead time to 24 hours, not only will you be able to take up more last-minute orders, but you can actually deliver twice the number of orders. You can also partner with a food aggregator app like CaterCurator which can help you make same-day deliveries to your customers. While you focus on getting the food out the door as soon as possible, the food aggregator can take care of all the logistics
More room to experiment
The best part about reducing lead times is that there’s more than one way to do it. You can optimize your menu to get rid of the time-intensive dishes and offer boxed lunches that can be prepared quickly. You can also use this as an opportunity to showcase a signature lunch menu that can be whipped up in no time.
Interestingly, 48 percent of customers prefer placing orders through a delivery platform to ensure quicker delivery of their orders. By enlisting the help of a trustworthy delivery partner, you can focus on decreasing your lead time in the kitchen while your delivery partner can make sure your orders get delivered on time.
Get ahead of the competition
To survive the fierce competition in the catering world, your business must offer value to the customers. By decreasing the catering lead times to accommodate the urgent needs of customers, you get an automatic advantage over competitors who require more time to fulfill the same order.
Optimize your catering lead times to maximize profitability
Shortening your delivery lead times can definitely help you to grow your catering business and retain more customers.
Joining a catering marketplace such as CaterCurator can help local caterers to spread the word about their lead times and bag more orders.
CaterCurator allows customers to apply filters based on delivery time to look up catering companies in their area who can deliver at a short notice. As CaterCurator also takes care of the delivery logistics, the orders get delivered right on-time, resulting in satisfied customers who can bring in more business.