See How Easily You Can Boost Sales By Connecting Your Restaurant Services Through Your Blackberry
These days business owners need to be quick on their feet. Especially restaurant operators, you need to secure every little advantage if you want your business to get anywhere in a market full of competition. I’m not exaggerating. Go to the nearest shopping center and tell me how many restaurants and foodservice establishments do you see.
The first rule is to separate yourself from your competitors. How do you do this? Better service, ambiance, reasonable pricing, improved parking and decor. But there’s something else—a huge advantage to take in more customers—most restaurant owners are taking for granted. Accessibility.
Here’s a fact. When a customer wants to reserve a table in advance, he looks up a couple of websites from his home or office computer. Here’s another fact: restaurant staffs aren’t early risers. So most reservations in the morning are simply recorded on an answering machine or sent as email to be read later on.
Most restaurants are already doing this. But this is no time to be “like most restaurants“. Remember, separate yourself from the competition. Do this by connecting your restaurant’s reservation system through your Blackberry.
The Blackberry is a handy tool for most restaurant operators, though only a handful is aware of it. With a Blackberry, you don’t have to be in front of the computer to accept a reservation, nor do you have to get up in the morning and answer the phone every time a customer dials your number. A Blackberry allows you to send customers personalized replies from anywhere!
If anything, and believe this, customers appreciate getting personalized feedback instead of a canned message from some automated answering machine.
A good deal is to let your general manager handle the Blackberry. A plan should cost you around $15 per month, more or less, but it’s a good trade for putting your restaurant at your customer’s fingertips. Tell your general manager he or she may use the Blackberry as a personal phone, which should encourage him or her enough to respond to customer inquiries professionally at all times.
Now in the event you need to change managers—you found a better person for the job or your manager has decided to leave your employment—you can easily transfer ownership of the Blackberry to the new person. It’s as easy as that. A Blackberry is indeed a restaurant operator’s best friend.
I’ve been in the foodservice consulting industry for some time now, and the use of a Blackberry to improve customer relations is one of the few innovations I’ve seen that actually work. It’s simple, it’s cost-effective, and most importantly, it succeeds in bringing restaurant franchises closer to their customers than their competitors. Separate yourself from competitors by bridging the gap between you and your customers.
The technology is already here, and the only thing left for restaurant owners to do is use it.
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