Hideaway is an award-winning jazz club in London, offering excellent live music, food and drink, along with regular comedy nights from some of the best new stand-ups on the circuit.
The venue in Streatham, South London, has a capacity of 450. The large space is split over two rooms, which means it can be a challenge for waiting staff to cover every corner, particularly when the lights go down for a performance.
That’s one of the reasons why Hideaway decided to use the getWaiter! app. Manager Ilja Kurguzov said he wanted to use getWaiter! because providing the very best customer service was so important to him. He explained that he chose it because he wanted everything about a customer’s visit to be as impressive as possible, and great table service was just as important as what was happening on stage.
He added: “You want to provide the ultimate level of service for your customers, so a system like this really helps. The better we can design the way we run our venue, the better the experience for our customers, and getWaiter! seems to offer almost limitless opportunities to do that.”
Hideaway has been using getWaiter! since November last year, and staff were impressed from the moment they saw it. “It only took an hour to set up, which was fantastic, and we were using it straight away,” commented Ilja. Staff were really intrigued with the technology, he added, which meant they were all keen to use it. Sometimes it can be difficult to motivate employees of a business to try a more productive way of working, but Ilja said that certainly wasn’t the case here, because staff actually found getWaiter! fun to use. No need to spend time training and ‘selling the idea’ to the waiting team – the simplicity and usability of the app meant staff were immediately on board.
Ilja went on to say that getWaiter! had particular benefits for his type of venue, because on jazz and comedy nights, it’s important that staff don’t distract from the main event.
“When an act is on and the lights go down, this is a really discrete way for people to call the waiter,” he added. Staff like it, because they don’t feel like they are intruding on the show or the customer’s experience of it. And customers know that once they’ve called the waiter using the app, they can relax, confident that a member of staff is on their way. They don’t need to look around the room trying to catch the eye of a waiter, and instead can concentrate on the show.
Ilja says he would urge anyone running a venue like his to try getWaiter! “It’s highly recommended. It allows you to structure and plan how you work, and you can use it to see if you need to reduce or increase the number of staff you use at particular times.” getWaiter! provides venues with a wealth of data that details average waiting times for each table, along with other key statistics. Businesses can use this information to ensure they have the optimum number of staff on shift, or even rearrange table layout in light of the patterns revealed by the data.
What’s more, the app also allows customers to give instant feedback about both food and service, with just a couple of button presses at the end of the visit. Ilja added: “All the feedback we’ve had has been really positive. People are excited about the idea when they see it.”
More info on Hideaway can be found at http://www.hideawaylive.co.uk
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 http://www.getwaiter.com
