PHOTO CREDIT: OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
With the increase in popularity of fast casual and fast-fine dining establishments, full service restaurants are under increasing pressure to provide top-notch dining experiences. Each diner’s experience begins the moment they step through restaurant doors and approach the host stand.
Seatninja Host is a low-cost solution that allows full-service restaurants to connect with guests and consistently provide a VIP Diner Experience. The digital seating system was created to emulate the paper tools that 90% of restaurants still use for managing walk-ins, waitlist parties, and reservations. Seatninja Host is a complete front-of-house system that will enable your staff to interact with guests via SMS or mobile application, gain visibility into where all seated guests are in the dining cycle, identify tables with VIPs and special occasions, quote accurate wait times by party size, manage and follow server rotations, quickly look up guest’s dining history, and more.
THE SITUATION
As a result of the growth in fast casual and fast-fine dining establishments, guests are becoming more and more intolerant of mistakes in lost reservations, long wait lists, and misquoted wait times. Guests are also starting to expect automated and seamless reservation and waitlist procedures at the front-of-house within a modern and up-to-date full-service restaurant. To appease unhappy and impatient customers, restaurants lose hundreds of dollars in revenue each month to guest comps or freebies to avoid bad press and poor Yelp reviews.
THE SOLUTION
Seatninja Host organizes and automates most of the host stand functions, such as taking and managing reservations and waitlists, managing seating, wait time estimates, and server rotation. The solution automatically suggests tables for guests, accurately estimates wait times, and organizes the guests into a seating line. The solution uses a two-way texting system to communicate with guests to let them know their table is ready and allows guests to disperse to other nearby areas and thus removing the pressure from small, over-crowded lobbies. In this way, it never loses a reservation or waitlist party, maximizing restaurant seating, without overbooking.
For easy server reference, the integrated Star Micronics TSP100III printer prints out a reservation or waitlist “chit” that includes each guest’s visit details including, name, number in party, visit history, permanent guest notes, current visit reservations notes, table number and any party flags assigned, i.e. birthday, anniversary, high chair required, etc. For additional server management, each server’s schedule can be printed from the system as well. The schedule includes the name of the server, the tables assigned to each server and his or her’s scheduled time in. This further ensures that each guest receives a VIP customer experience delivered not only from the front-of-the-house stand, but also their server as well.
THE RESULTS
The Seatninja and Star Micronics solution deliver an immediate ROI on the monthly subscription. Setup takes, on average, less than an hour. The solution is paired with an iPad tablet upon deployment. Training is quick and easy, completed in an hour or less and staff typically and staff typically reaches proficiency with the solution within two shifts or less.
Full service restaurants who deploy the solution may see some or all of the following results:
- fewer table checks ($75 per month in savings)
- additional table turns ($400 per month in additional revenue)
- decrease in reservation no shows ($400 per month in savings)
- decrease in walk outs on waitlists ($400 per month in savings)
- no lost or damaged paper replacements ($100 per month in savings)
- reservations can be taken automatically during off hours ($1500 per month in additional revenue)
- reduced comps for mistakes ($100 per month in savings)
- automatic table assignments for reservations ($124 per month in savings)
