When COVID-19 hit, the restaurant industry immediately suffered a devastating blow, causing many owners to wonder if they would recover. With several countries and states going into lockdown for portions of 2020, countless restaurants had to adjust their operations to keep their businesses afloat. Some pivoted to a takeout-only model, others tried outdoor or socially distanced seating, while others were forced to close their doors. As the vaccine allows the world to reopen and patrons begin looking for a return to normalcy, Zappter is at the forefront, helping restaurants reopen after COVID-19.

What Is the Zappter App Builder?

Zappter is a unique platform that allows business owners to build, design, and customize their own apps easily and entirely using drag-and-drop. Users can choose a stunning business app theme, and with just a few clicks, they can complete building their apps visually, whether they’re simple or complex. Then turn an app into a complete business solution using hundreds of business-focused, pluggable features the platform offers to empower business owners.

Entrepreneurs Haroun Ben Mahmoud and Mevludin Hodza, veterans of mobile application technology, launched Zappter early this year with a focus on helping businesses to maximize their revenue and simplify operations. With restaurants looking to reopen after the pandemic, their app builder is arriving just in time.

How the Zappter App Builder Can Help Restaurants Reopen

Mahmoud works closely with Zappter’s research and development teams to create a robust, detailed plan to help restaurants streamline their reopenings in a way that makes patrons feel comfortable and ensures businesses comply with standards and regulations.

“Restaurants returning to business after COVID is great news for every one of us,” Haroun Ben Mahmoud said. “But reopening their doors from restricted operating models or coming back from a complete shutdown comes with huge costs. They need COVID-safe plans to adapt to the new normal.”

The Zappter App Builder offers these powerful features in the apps to support restaurant owners with their reopening plans effectually:

Digital Menus

Zappter offers a digital menu, a revolutionary feature that is already starting to change the dining experience in many restaurants. With digital menus, guests can simply scan their table’s QR code, view menu items on their smartphones, and place their orders right at the table.

This self-ordering feature helps encourage and promote contactless, COVID-safe dining strategies for restaurants and improves the customer experiences by (literally) letting diners take control of their orders. The customer can place their orders instantly using their smartphones upon being seated without waiting for restaurant staff.

Contactless Payments

Businesses can opt to work with one or more of the many secure payment methods Zappter provides. To adjust to COVID-safety guidelines, restaurants can adapt to tap-to-pay. Customers can simply tap, hold, or wave their contactless cards and smartphones with mobile wallets over a terminal to pay their bills.

Alternatively, the restaurants can also choose to work with contactless payments using QR codes, which can help customers pay their bills, being entirely away from a payment terminal by scanning the restaurant’s QR code with their phones.

Outdoor Dining

Restaurants can extend their dining areas to patios, poolside, or beaches to balance their capacity and maintain social distancing with the “Places” feature. This helps restaurants generate QR codes that can be placed anywhere and allows restaurant staff to identify where to deliver the order.

For example, if a restaurant has opened a patio to allow for social distancing, they can generate a unique QR code and assign it to one of the tables outside. When a customer is seated, they scan the QR code and place their order through the digital menu. The staff knows where to deliver the order because of the assigned QR code.

Staggered Resource Planning

When implementing staggered work hours to ensure minimum staff attendance at any time, the restaurants might have to adapt to unusual numbers of shifts. Zappter helps tackle this situation with built-in sell controls, including time-based and resource controls to help customize the rosters with the new staggered arrangements during different and progressive stages of reopening.

Contact Tracing

Contact tracing is the process of identifying if an individual has been in close contact with an infected person, resulting in a potential infection. Some communities may require enforcing contact tracing methods that could be part of the “new normal.”

Zappter has a free COVID-19 contact tracing plugin restaurants can install in their apps to help control the spreading of COVID-19 using QR Codes.

Zappter’s Order Fulfillment “Rules”

Zappter has several “rules” for businesses to mix and match their requirements before a potential buyer completes their order. They can collect data, restrict payment options and regions open to sell. For example, a restaurant owner can set up “rules” in the app that says, “any customer wanting to buy an alcoholic beverage must confirm their date of birth with the server.” The customer would then need to provide their ID to the server to verify their date of birth before the customer can complete the order.

Likewise, a restaurant can program a rule that only allows X product to be sold for users in Texas. Anyone outside Texas won’t be able to complete their order. There is a multitude of rules Zappter offers that users can set up to control sales. Restaurant owners can highly benefit from this feature when strategizing their reopening plans, considering the restrictive nature it involves.

Marketing

“At Zappter, we always thought of supporting capital-intensive restaurant operations with the tools to help plan their sustainable revenue,” Mahmoud said. “A successful reopening plan should be backed by an effective marketing strategy.”

Zappter provides powerful built-in features to segment customers by area, age group, sex, revenue stats, and target or re-target customers with marketing strategies. Additionally, the restaurants can utilize powerful integration with leading third-party marketing tools, such as HubSpot, CRM, SendGrid, Twak, Twilio SMS GW, MailChimp, and more.

Moving Forward While Keeping COVID Behind Us

Zappter makes reopening after COVID-19 easy for restaurant owners with their versatile and innovative new app. Besides the recovery and growth benefits, the app can help keep COVID at bay. Because of the severe financial impact the pandemic had on organizations, Zappter has become a true ally, empowering non-technical business owners through a quality, easy-to-use, and cost-effective platform. This is a pivotal time for business owners, and with Zappter’s support, the restaurant industry will be well on its way to recovery.

For more information on Zappter, and to try the Zappter App Builder for free, visit zappter.com.

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