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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Five Ways For Diners To Find Your Restaurant On iPhone

The iPhone is truly something special. On the iPhone, could predict which of their friends would get married next or find the best restaurants in town.

I don’t know about friends getting married, but the second application is no doubt very interesting to a restaurant owner. Here’s five ways people are getting information about restaurants on iPhone.

1.    Yelp
I remember writing about Yelp in one of my previous posts. Anyway, Yelp allows customers to write and submit reviews about your place directly from their iPhones. Sometimes the reviews are good, but most of the time are amateur at most.

Thanks to Yelp, potential diners are now getting a taste of your menu even before they walk in the front entrance.

2.    OpenTable
OpenTable is an online reservation service for restaurants. If you’ve been in the foodservice business for some years now, you’ve probably heard about it one time or another. Diners could now use their iPhones to find your restaurant using OpenTable and even make a reservation. Brilliant.

3.    VegOut
Eating out has always been a problem for vegetarians. But not anymore. VegOut is an iPhone application that searches for vegetarian and vegan restaurants only. Put yourself in the good graces of this application if you run a vegetarian restaurant.

4.    LocalEats
The difference between LocalEats and other iPhone applications is that LocalEats only shows the 100 best restaurants within the 50 largest cities in the US. So getting your restaurant picked by one of their editors is definitely a cause for celebration.

5.    UrbanSpoon
UrbanSpoon tries to be unique by supporting a slot machine interface that selects restaurants based on three factors – food type, price, and neighborhood.

Leaving your business to chance is something no restaurant owner wants to happen. But that’s just the way it goes. The one thing you can do, however, is to make sure your restaurant is included in UrbanSpoon’s list of places.

It’s amazing how a single application could either attract or push away potential customers with the press of a button. As a restaurant owner, you need to learn to roll with the punches, and hope that Yelp doesn’t say anything about your restaurant that isn’t true.

Got any more iPhone applications in mind? Share them by leaving a comment below.