Keeping people waiting a long time is one of the easiest ways to make sure your customers don’t come back with repeat business.
Whether they’re waiting for the bill, or they want to order more drinks, slow service is seen as a major flaw, and is one of the most common complaint about restaurants and cafes.
But what if there was a free app that could help ensure your staff respond far quicker than the competition? And better still, what if there were solid statistics to back up the claim?
We’ve got the solution
This is exactly what you get with getWaiter! Using the free app on a standard inexpensive tablet set up at a central point in the venue, staff can refer to a live dashboard that shows exactly how long each customer has been waiting, down to the second. The moment a diner uses their app to ask for table service, the clock starts ticking, and staff get alerted. You can even set a target response time, so that for example, once a table has been waiting longer than three minutes, waiting staff get further notification because the dashboard changes colour.
We have been piloting getWaiter! at a number of busy restaurants, and found that the app can dramatically reduce waiting and frustration. Think for a moment about how long you normally have to wait for your bill? Five minutes? Ten? Fifteen? From our experience, getting it in under quarter of an hour is increasingly rare. Getting it in less than five minutes would be great.
Table service in under two minutes
One pilot in a London restaurant during the busy Christmas period showed that customers who used the app to call for the bill waited on average only one minute 40 seconds. The figures were equally good for those who used getWaiter! to order more drinks. In these cases, a member of staff reached them in a little over two minutes. That’s a remarkable improvement on what people are used to.
We think this is particularly impressive because we’ve ensured that the data is focused on new users of the app. In other words, all these stats are from people who haven’t used the app before, which means that the improvements are not because repeat customers are getting clever about using it and skewing the results. Instead, it’s because waiting staff are modifying their performance based on the live queuing information they are getting. Waiting teams are getting more efficient because they know exactly which customers to prioritise.
It’s more efficient because staff only make one trip to the table to present the bill (not once to get asked, and back again to bring it). And of course, faster service throughout a meal means customers are more likely to buy additional drinks – in fact, 15 per cent of people using the app did just that.
The app is free for both consumers and businesses, so when you consider that restaurants are getting more efficient staff without any financial outlay, that’s a great result. And if that can happen simply by using the data getWaiter! provides for free, imagine how much productivity can go up when businesses capitalise on the advanced statistical reporting that’s available as part of our premium package.
Find out today how getWaiter! can help you. The app is available for both iOS and Android and can be downloaded here.
It’s really easy for restaurants, bars and cafes to set up an account too, so find out more here.
