Category: Latest News

Do you wish there was a fairer way to get vital customer feedback for your restaurant?

Do you wish customers told you about problems with the meal straightaway, rather than saving their criticisms for Trip Advisor?

Maybe it’s time you started using getWaiter!

Customer feedback and word-of-mouth recommendations are vital in the hospitality industry.

You want to know if people are impressed by your service, but you also want the opportunity to fix problems before customers make a public complaint online.

But for all the convenience of review sites like Toptable and Trip Advisor, they’re unfortunately a bit of a magnet for knee-jerk complaints. Good reviews, on the other hand, are sadly less likely to make it onto the site, because fewer people rush back after a great meal to post their praise online.

www.getWaiter.com is different. Customers are asked for feedback the moment they pay the bill, and it’s made so simple that they can do it in an instant – allowing them to comment on both service and food.

Sadly, really great meals are sometimes more quickly forgotten than bad ones, but this way, you get their feedback while the pleasurable evening is still fresh in their minds.

Of course, if the worst did happen and your customer was unhappy, you find out immediately. This gives you a chance to make it right while they’re still on the premises, whether that’s with a heartfelt apology, free drinks or a discounted meal to make up for it.

That way you can hopefully still send them away happy and they won’t feel the need to sound off on Trip Advisor. If you handle it right, you may even turn a bad review into a good one if you act fast to resolve their problems.

Our free getWaiter! app is all about helping you give the very best customer service. And thanks to clever analytics, you can monitor every aspect of performance and customer feedback in on dashboard, giving you vital insights essential to fine-tune your business.

Find out more about how getWaiter! can help you here.

Does your restaurant need an iPad or tablet?

getWaiter! is the perfect restaurant app for the iPad or a tablet. It turns the gadget that can waste endless hours of your life on Facebook, Angry Birds and Twitter into a device that instead will turbo-charge your business, and help deliver fantastic table service for your customers. And when you’ve got happy customers, you’ve got healthy profits.

So at getWaiter! we’d certainly recommend an iPad or tablet, because that’s all you need to get all the great benefits from our service. No specialist software, no complicated equipment, just a tablet and you’re away.

In fact, there is so much power in getWaiter! that you’ll never want to close down the app. Which is how it should be, because we recommend that you always keep it running. That way, at any moment all you need to do is glance at the screen to see exactly how the business is performing. Now of course, there are other things you can do with an iPad in the restaurant industry, from managing bookings to creating interactive wine lists, or even flying dishes to customers’ tables with an tablet-controlled mini-helicopter (yes really, Yo Sushi in London had a go) but we bet there’s nothing else out there that can boost your performance and profits anywhere near as well as getWaiter!

So take our advice: devote your tablet to getWaiter!, and you won’t need any other gimmicks because your restaurant will be wowing customers with brilliant table service. And at the end of the day, isn’t that much more appealing?

getWaiter! is free for iPad so to find out how getWaiter! can help your business, read more here.

Will computers take over the hospitality industry?

We live in a pretty futuristic world. We can use gadgets to buy anything, from anybody, any time, anywhere.

Thanks to e-commerce giants like Amazon and eBay, and supermarket delivery services like Ocado, we can now purchase almost everything we need without ever interacting with another human being.

So is the same going to happen in the hospitality industry? Will advances in mobile technology mean that soon there will be no waiters, no sommeliers, nobody to show you to your table and no-one to bring the bill?

Here at getWaiter!, we don’t think so.

Yes, we’re proud to have an app that uses the convenience of smartphones and tablets to drastically improve customer service in restaurants, bars, hotels and cafes. But we also strongly believe that technology can – and should – only go so far. That’s why getWaiter! hasn’t been designed to replace waiting staff. Instead, it helps them to do a great job by connecting them with their customers in a really simple but effective way.

So even though boffins can do very clever things with gadgets so customers can potentially book a table, order all the food, and pay the bill without dealing with a human, at getWaiter!, we think we will always need waiting staff. Here’s why:

Customers want a warm welcome
First impressions count, and your staff play a vital role. Diners want to know that you are genuinely happy that they have chosen your place, and they best way to do that is to tell them. With an enthusiastic welcome, a smile, and if they’re a regular, maybe even a handshake or hug if your that kind of flamboyant restaurateur.

Get rid of your staff, and all you’re left with is a sign saying ‘please choose a table and order your food’. Not quite the same, is it?

People aren’t predictable
Restaurants have to have menus, but they need to be flexible. There will always be customers who want something slightly different to what’s on offer, perhaps because they are allergic to the cheese in the sauce, or simply because they’d rather have poached, not fried eggs.

That’s why with getWaiter!, customers don’t order from a digital menu in the app. Staff still personally take their orders, because that way, customers can ask for exactly what they want. And when you give people what they want, they’ll probably come back for more.

Diners love personal recommendations
Customers are reassured when their waiter really knows what they are talking about. What exactly is in the seafood salad? How big is the lasagne? How spicy is the chilli? However detailed your digital menu, you’ll never cover off everything.

And it’s not just extra information customers need. They like to ask opinions too, whether it’s about which wine goes best with the lamb, what’s good here for pescetarians, or simply “which pudding do you like best?” If there’s no-one to ask, choosing from a complex menu can feel too much like guesswork, and can add stress to what is supposed to be a relaxing experience.

getWaiter! loves hospitality staff
Those are just three reasons why we designed getWaiter! in the way we did. We know how important waiting staff are, and we know how tough their role can sometimes be, so we wanted an app that made life better for them and their customers.

If you want to see how our free app can harness the power of technology while enhancing the personal touch that’s essential for great customer service, go to www.getwaiter.com/merchant