Melis is a Turkish restaurant in Olney, set just off the High Street. It is renowned for its excellent food, which is full of flavour and beautifully presented and is one of our first pilot sites for the getwaiter.com service. Having used getWaiter! for a few weeks, we spoke to the restaurant owner Yelda to find out what she thought about the service and app and importantly what her customers thought too!
Melis has several areas inside and out including an outside terrace, downstairs bar area and two separate dining areas on the first floor with 55 tables in total. The restaurant has recently started using getWaiter! to help with its restaurant management and to enhance the customer experience for its diners.
Yelda Mackley, the restaurant’s owner said: “getWaiter! is super helpful for us to manage the customer experience especially as we have several distinct dining areas. We have five on our waiting team and four kitchen staff. Since first seeing getWaiter! and setting it up, we haven’t switched it off and customers absolutely love it. We have already received positive comments about the attentiveness of our staff.
“No matter where customers are seated, inside or out or across the two floors, they can call us when they need us. This means that even casual and temporary staff who are new to our business can be confident that no diner is being neglected. It means we can maintain really high customer service standards, regardless of whether our waiters have worked with us for years, or only started that day.
“It has also improved our waiting staff performance as there is less of a situation of a waiter ‘shadowing’ diners to see if they have finished or want more service, which I think can sometimes be quite intimidating for diners. In our establishment, the waiters now use this saved time by continuing with the other prep they need to get through as part of their job.”
Melis customers are told about getWaiter! by the waiting staff as they are being seated at their table and encouraged to use the app whenever they want some more drinks, want to get the waiter’s attention or are ready to pay their bill. The business console, which is running on a Samsung tablet, is part of the waiting management system at the restaurant bar and Yelda explains that although being a technophobe, was easy to set up and manage.
Yelda continues, “The staff love getWaiter! too – we have set it so that within a minute of a customer notifying us they want something, we will be there. The system is easy to use and I ran through it once with our waiting staff who immediately saw the benefits. I think for the nights where we have less staff on and they feel more stretched, they, as well as the customers, feel more in control.”
More info on Melis can be found at http://www.melisrestaurant.com/
About getWaiter!
getWaiter! is a new free smartphone app (for both Android and iOS) for consumers and internet-based portal for hospitality businesses, which can improve customer service in the hospitality industry by making it easy for diners to call their waiter. Designed to work in any business that offers customer-focused service – from restaurants and hotels, to bars and cafes – getWaiter! is an essential tool for organisations striving to provide quick and attentive waiting service for their customers while improving business performance. The powerful cloud-based service also comes with optional sophisticated analytics software so that merchants can track exactly how well teams are performing by pinpointing which parts of the room are busiest, spotting bottlenecks, and fine-tuning staffing levels to minimise wait times and increase table rotations, so that they are always working at optimum levels.
Diners who feel looked after by attentive staff are more likely to order more drinks and extra courses and of course return again. By making sure customers can tell staff quickly if there’s a problem with the meal, restaurateurs can fix the issue before it turns into a complaint that needs to be resolved with freebies and discounts.
More info on getWaiter! can be found at getwaiter.com
