Heavenly hospitality
Heavenly hospitality
Jan 01, 05: It is one thing to deliver good service inside a restaurant, but the overall reputation of the establishment could still suffer if email requests for bookings are not answered quickly, or worse, are completely ignored. Rodney Appleyard reports on a new booking service, which promises to help restaurants respond to every email enquiry effectively.
Overworked restaurant staff and frustrated patrons alike have a reason to be grateful to a young Sydney entrepreneur who has come up with an innovative solution to the problem of restaurant bookings that fall through the cracks and are not dealt with.
Twenty-six year old Dean McEvoy has utilised his experiences as a former restaurant owner and a producer of Channel 7's Olympic website during the Sydney Games, in his latest role of founder and general manager of Booking Angel, a company he created with the help of his business partner, David Watson. The technology at the centre of Booking Angel earned McEvoy a place among the finalists in 2004's Yellow Pages Business Awards-the only IT entry represented in the eight short listed entrants.
The new system transforms each email request into a computer-generated voice message, which is then relayed to the venue by phone. The computer-generated voice asks a member of staff if a booking can be made within the timeframe stipulated by the customer. The restaurant staff member can simply respond to the call by pressing numbers on the phone keypad to indicate the timeslot available.
Once this process has taken place, the customer receives an email message back to inform them whether or not their booking has been accepted.
McEvoy explains why this service is so valuable, not only in terms of improving a restaurant's image, but also its takings.
"The public's expectation of Internet requests is an instant response. This is virtually impossible for restaurants. My biggest frustration as a restaurateur was keeping in contact with booking enquiries made via the Internet and even fax.
"Sometimes customers would have to wait over a day to receive a response and sometimes faxes would go missing. This is just not good enough from the customer's perspective, nor does it create a positive image of the restaurant."
McEvoy and Watson decided to create their own CRM tool, which uses a blend of open source and proprietary technology. According to the pair, they could quite feasibly outsource this model to other companies that are interested in creating a similar service in a different industry.
The only proprietary technology they used is the speech software. They had to use an American voice for this service, because an Australian voice was not available, but this is something they hope to change next year, when new voices are released.
At the moment, Booking Angel has 40 restaurants in Sydney using the service, but they hope to attract many more throughout 2005, considering over 50 percent of restaurants in Australia have a presence online.
The Booking Angel service can be found on two of the major websites that provide a huge gateway for restaurants to take bookings. These websites are:
www.eatability.com.au and www.citysearch.com.au.
Booking Angel plans to roll the service out throughout the rest of Australia eventually, with new offices already planned in Melbourne and Brisbane. It has also recently implemented a call centre which is currently operated by 16 staff, although it can hold up to 42 people.
McEvoy says the restaurants that have used the service have been very pleased with it so far, and he cannot see why other restaurants around the world would not be interested in it too.
"Its potential is limitless. We would like to keep growing so that we can apply it to a variety of industries too. For instance, it could be useful for people in other countries who want to book accommodation to stay in Australia. Combined with the latest technology, it creates such a convenient way to keep organised.
"For instance, we recently received feedback from an American customer who made an enquiry about a booking in Sydney on his Blackberry just before he left the U.S. airport to head for Australia. He received the email confirmation for his reservation at the restaurant on his Blackberry phone when he arrived in Sydney after the flight. He said he was delighted with the service, because he knew that he would be going somewhere pleasant to eat as soon as he set foot in the city."
According to McEvoy, the service fits well with running a busy restaurant, satisfies customer services demands, maximises Internet bookings and ultimately makes the restaurant money.
"In addition, it's a form of advertising they can measure. Restaurants often advertise in newspapers and magazines, which is great for brand awareness, but it's difficult to measure the success of the advertising in terms of bums on seats."
The system is also capable of containing a history of every person who has contacted the restaurant and made a booking. In addition, it produces receipts and saves notes based on each booking.
Judy McMahon, the owner of Catalina's, a restaurant in Rose Bay, was one of the first adopters of the service, having started using the Booking Angel system about 18 months ago. Although the service has not made a huge impact on her business yet, she expects it to help her cope in the future when online bookings are likely to rise.
"We have always been a very computer savvy restaurant, so we have always kept up to date with our email bookings. However, I think this Booking Angel system is very useful for those restaurants which do not have an organised system for dealing with email reservations.
"From our point of view, it does make life easier through receiving a phone call, but we only really expect to see the benefits of the system when emails increase significantly in volume, to the point where we get more in than we can respond back to. When that time comes, Booking Angel will help us greatly to deal with the influx."
McMahon says another reason she chose to use the service was the exposure her restaurant stood to gain on some of the most popular restaurant booking websites, such as www.citysearch.com.au and www.eatability.com.au. Booking Angel has a strong affiliation with these websites, which proved a strong selling point.
"It will only be a matter of time before larger numbers of customers decide that it is far more convenient for them to make a reservation online, and when that day comes, we'll be ready with this system to meet the demand."
Although it is very much in its infancy, it has already proved to be of huge worth to the hospitality industry in Sydney. There does not seem to be any restrictions in the way of its growth, with interest already expressed in other parts of Australia. It will only be a matter of time before the booking system spreads into other industries around the world too. If its debut in the Sydney restaurant business is anything to go by, there certainly seems to be plenty of appetite for its use to speed up customer service and enhance reputations.
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