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Guide to running a successful mobile RFP process

This comprehensive guide will help you make an educated decision about which vendors to choose for your business.

March 31, 2015 by rob taylor — founder, splick-it

You're getting ready to evaluate different vendors to support your mobile strategy in 2015 and beyond, which is a perfect time to make sure your Request For Proposal process is comprehensive. Here are some tips for asking the right questions so that you get a true, apples to apples comparison of features, services and pricing.

While you'll want to weigh answers differently depending upon your overall goals, this comprehensive guide should be a great template and will help you make an educated decision about which vendors to choose for your business.

Some sample questions are highlighted in this article. For the comprehensive RFP Guide with over 150 relevant questions please email hello@splickit.com for the full guide.

The questions in a typical RFP fall into a number of general categories outlined here:

General Business Operations

These questions include basics such as where the company hosts their servers, emergency procedures, uptime, if they license all applicable intellectual property for ordering/payment/loyalty, the company's level of PCI compliance, where data is stored and many more basic questions.

While larger restaurant groups have their operations and legal counsel involved in this process, mid-sized and smaller restaurants typically don't.

Design and branding

How customizable is the vendor's product? Does it have the ability to develop from the ground up, or is there a platform with templates to work within? Are there additional fees for design and branding or does the basic cost include everything?

You'd be amazed at how different the services are from company to company, so getting all of the details up front is helpful when making a final decision.

Platforms provided

Generally speaking, having both a responsive website and iOS and Android native applications are considered a best practice. Some companies will try to tell you that you don't need native apps because they don't actually support them. You'll miss out on a lot of opportunities to communicate with your customers if you don't have native apps.

Web and app functionality

What exactly does the app do? Start with basics such as geo-locating the store and providing maps and directions to your business. If you do delivery, you'll want to make sure the vendor offers multiple delivery zones for neighborhoods to support varied pricing and schedules. The complexities of menuing and flexibility around ordering are really important to understand so that your customers can get what they really want and your kitchen can handle the operations. Do you have a lot of modifiers, substitutions and pricing variations? Make sure your vendors can handle those needs. Also important is to understand the level of local menu control and data available to your store managers and corporate team through some sort of portal.

Payment

If you decide to have ordering and pre-payment or e-wallet functionality in the app, stored value gift cards, and NFC compatibility, there are some important questions to consider. Among them, which payment providers the vendors partner with, if they are flexible and can work with your preferred existing partners, what the ‘card-not-present' fee structure is for each order, their level of PCI compliance, security and who is responsible for charge backs.

Data and reporting

Is the vendor able to provide easy-to-access and easy-to-use reports that match up to what your accounting team needs to reconcile the business? Can customer segments be broken out by user, location, and behaviors? Can marketing use available data to create relevant promotions?  

Marketing and loyalty

One of the best reasons for having a mobile application is how much more you'll know about your customers which should lead to more relevant marketing communications. This truly meets the needs of your customers and thus loyal and deeper customer relationships. Some of the basic marketing requirements to ask about include capabilities around promotions and couponing, in-app messaging, push notifications, charity round-up, social media integrations, email marketing and the ability to reward a variety of behaviors including items purchased, points earned, visits to the restaurant, surveys taken, and sharing with friends.

Operations, training and customer support

Integrating a mobile/web application into a restaurant's POS has become the Holy Grail for some restaurateurs to simplify operations. But it's not always possible, desirable or fiscally responsible to integrate. If your restaurant group has a variety of POS in use, a non-POS integrated solution is probably best. If you're a small independent restaurant, the costs of integrating and maintaining the POS integration probably don't make sense either. Understand the long-term costs of managing a POS integration before making this a requirement.

Another key area to pay attention to is customer support. There will inevitably be a need for taking care of your customers either by the vendor or an outside support service. Most restaurants are not prepared to take this on themselves. Find out for yourself how skilled the support team is by calling in to test their responses for existing customers.

Don't overlook training either. Your team will need ongoing training at the corporate, regional, store and employee level. Some vendors include a tiny amount of training in their proposals and others offer a lot. You'll appreciate the ongoing training as your business grows.

For the complete Guide To Running A Successful Mobile RFP Process, email hello@splickit.com.