Read about our latest site, the award-winning Hideaway Jazz Club in London……..

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

In the restaurant trade, service is king.

That’s the opinion of Russell Norman, the presenter of BBC Two’s The Restaurant Man. The TV programme is a refreshing change from the yelling Gordon Ramsay, because it focuses on what we also believe is absolutely crucial in the restaurant game: customer service. As he explains in his show, “no amount of good food is going to rescue a bad service experience.”

So while Ramsay screams until people perfect their puff pastry, Norman has in our opinion some far more useful advice. This is what he has to say:

“The restaurant isn’t necessarily about the food. It’s about the way it makes you feel, the people you’re having a conversation with, the conversation you’re having with the waiter.”

We couldn’t agree more. Our getWaiter! app and cloud based hospitality display service is designed to help create that perfect dining experience. It allows customers to call the waiter using their smartphone, which can dramatically reduce waiting times. It means staff don’t have to hover over tables, and diners don’t have to break off their conversations with each other as they try to catch a waiter’s eye. Not only that, but the app also allows people to leave instant feedback about the food and service, which in business terms is probably one of the most important conversations a waiter can have with their customers.

“If people have to wait too long they’ll leave and never come back.”

As we’ve explained, getWaiter! can avoid table service delays, but how long is ‘too long’? Russell doesn’t have a specific time in mind, but with getWaiter!, you can.

The cloud based merchant dashboard allows you to decide exactly how quickly you want staff to react. For example, as well as the initial call, you may want to set the service to further flag anyone who has been waiting longer than two minutes. The tablet your staff use to monitor calls – normally positioned somewhere central for the whole team to access – will highlight those tables, so waiters know how to prioritise. And taking it a step further, if staff manage to operate so efficiently that the screen never flashes one of these warnings, you know that nobody at all has been waiting ‘too long’.

“The difference between success and failure is attention to detail.”

This is an area where Russell has some solid statistics. For him, attention to detail means looking at every aspect of your operation, and one element is the ratio between staff and customers. His recommendation is one for every 15 customers. In general terms, you can mirror this for your venue, simply by estimating how many diners you tend to see each day.

getWaiter! can be even more precise though. getWaiter!’s advanced reporting means you can analyse the flow of customers during specific parts of the day. For example, it will tell you exactly when your staff were overstretched and causing undesirable delays in service. Similarly, you can use the data to spot when you may have too many staff on, allowing you to plan your rotas more efficiently. It’s this kind of fine-tuning that will help you optimise your venue’s performance, so that as well as offering great service to customers, you also ensure you do it in a cost-effective way.

These are just a few of the ways getWaiter! can help you give customers a fantastic experience, so find out more by downloading today. The app is available for both iOS and Android here.

It’s really easy for restaurants, bars and cafes to set up an account too, so find out more here

How long should it take to get the bill? How about less than two minutes?

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.