Best Practices for Reopening a Restaurant During the Coronavirus Pandemic

September 26, 2020 by No Comments

Many restaurants are ramping up and preparing for the reopening process. In the wake of the drastic impact COVID-19 has had on the hospitality industry, many small businesses and chains are finally ready to welcome diners back to their tables. While this is an exciting time for many business owners, there’s also a distinct air of uncertainty.

It’s important to run your restaurant with integrity and be able to adapt in real-time to address the needs of regulars, potential customers and your staff members. This means addressing new regulations, making smart tech investments, and preparing to overhaul your digital presence. Here’s what you need to know.

Increase your focus on online ordering.

Online orders helped many businesses survive the lockdown. With limited dining room capacities, it’s definitely going to keep playing a major role in your daily operations, but with so many platforms for online ordering it can get overwhelming and hard to manage. That’s where companies like Cuboh can help. Like many restaurateurs, you probably have a handful of tablets, each connected to various delivery platforms. It’s cumbersome and many of these platforms don’t integrate with your POS. Cuboh’s model changes that, making it a breeze to manage them all from a single tablet.

By consolidating your online ordering platforms to one device and ensuring POS integration, Cuboh makes it easier for you to respond to every Doordash, GrubHub and Uber Eats takeout or delivery order. With an intuitive UI and smart dashboard, it’s easy to handle refunds, push orders to the POS, and conduct upcharges. Cuboh online ordering makes it so you can stop bouncing between mobile apps and focus on the user experience.

Rethink your marketing best practices.

Do your social media channels and web design principles reflect your brand’s stance on dining precautions and service commitment? If not, you may need some digital marketing assistance. By partnering with a digital marketing agency or web design company, you can update your digital interface to reflect your values. Whether you need a new website on more intuitive CMS UI or you need some web design and logo design for your existing site, don’t neglect your website development. Finding a digital marketing agency or a team of web developers is as easy as doing a location-specific search like “Denver web design companies.”

If you find an agency with years of experience, they can help you with social media marketing, search engine optimization, email marketing, web design and analytics. You can even find a copywriter to help with your blogs and social posts. The right digital marketing services can help you achieve a responsive website that boosts your digital visibility and improves the user experience. If you want your target audience to know how you’re adapting to COVID-19, start with some website design, graphic design and social media marketing.

Enforce transparent policies.

Your vision for reopening also needs to align with new CDC recommendations if you want it to come to fruition. You need to be able to ensure cleanliness and staff hygiene for your customer base. Your customer service efforts should revolve around cleanliness deadlines, sanitization routines and regular handwashing. While these can sometimes impact prep times, it shouldn’t take you a long time to integrate these concepts effectively. Startups and veteran eateries in the United States need to listen to recommendations, set policies based on them, and be able to enforce these policies in a smart, sensible way.

COVID-19 has impacted a variety of industries but few that were hit as hard as the hospitality industry. Now that restrictions are easing up, it’s time to consider how you’re going to handle reopening. Whether you’re partnering with the Cuboh team or hiring a digital marketing team to help you build an effective website on a new content management system, there are practical steps you can take to ensure your reopening process is a success.