Text Your Guests When Their Table Is Ready

One of the integrated guest paging functions within Save My Table (along with automated voice calls at the touch of a button) is …

customizable 2-way text message paging to your guests

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When the waiting party’s table is ready, the host simply pushes a button on the notification item that appears on the screen, and a text is instantly sent to the guest’s cell phone.

The guest can also reply to the text, and the reply appears right next to the notification to the host, so the restaurant is kept up to date by the guest, too. For example, the guest might reply “on the way”, or “will be there in 5 minutes.” This gives the host the option to make an informed decision about pushing that guest back to the top of the wait list and seating another guest while waiting for the paged party to return to the host stand.

It’s one of the many features of Save My Table that we’re getting rave reviews about from our client restaurants. We invite you to try it out for yourself with a free 14-day trial of Save My Table, you can get going today!

Biggest Trend for Restaurants This Year

Happy New Year!

What trends changed the restaurant industry the most in 2010? While we obviously think the trend towards electronic table management tools is the most exciting thing, we might be a bit biased! What do you think?

We’d love to know your thoughts, and hope you all have a great 2011. If you haven’t checked out Save My Table yet at your restaurant, we invite you to give us a 2 week spin, with our no-risk free trial.

Marketing to your customer base

How does your restaurant use it’s customer lists? Do you maintain a customer list database at all?

Once of the many advantages to using Save My Table is that it automatically builds, and maintains, your customer list database.

As reservations are made, and walk-ins sat, every bit of information entered is stored, building your database continuously and seamlessly.

This data can then be used in a variety of different ways. You can of course send mass e-mails to drive repeat business to your customer list, to everyone in your list, or a segment based on your own custom filter criteria.

You can also create a downloadable list based on a custom filter. For example, you could filter for only those visitors who have come in more than twice in the last 30 days, or those that haven’t come in recently, or those that have an upcoming birthday. You can then either send an e-mail right away right from Save My Table, or this list can then be downloaded to Excel and used to create mailing labels for a mailer campaign.

The marketing benefits of a well maintained, continuously updated, customer list database can be huge. If you’re not already running Save My Table at your restaurant, I hope you will check us out.

Craft Beers in Restaurants

How much time do you spend sourcing interesting craft beers for patrons at your restaurant? According to this article from Craft Beer Restaurant http://craftbeerrestaurant.com/Craft_Beer_Restaurant/Cigar_City.html it may well be worth the effort. It not only will drive new guests, but it will potentially improve the quality of your restaurant’s image with existing customers.

What else might help improve your restaurant’s image to your customers? Save My Table SaaS software for restaurants – with it’s ability to drive new guests through on-line reservations, page parties when their table is ready via SMS text message or automated voice-call, and seat guests at the optimal table.

Social Media Integration for Restaurants

There’s no escaping the importance of social media now, it’s everywhere! That’s why our next monthly release is internally named “Social Release One”. It’s our first step into helping restaurant integrate with the social media networks (Twitter, Facebook on this go ’round) directly from their host stand application.

While there’s lots of things on the horizon, here’s some features that will be added next:

• Automatic posting to Twitter when a new e-mail campaign is sent – this will be an automated headline with a shortened link to the campaign.
• Facebook and Twitter connected reservation widget. Now a restaurant’s guests won’t need to fill in their information each time they make a reservation – if they connect to with their Facebook or Twitter log-in, we’ll remember them and fill out their information for them.
• Introduction of a Facebook page reservation widget. This easy to drop in widget can be embedded right into your restaurant’s fan page.

If your restaurant isn’t runing Save My Table, give us a go. A free trial can be started in about a minute, and there’s no credit card required.

Keeping Track of Guests at Your Restaurant

Keeping tabs on your guests comings and goings, and especially on their (sometimes ever-changing) likes and dislikes, is one of the most critical part of effective front of house management at a restaurant.

Save My Table makes this job a lot easier.

Firstly, Save My Table keeps a complete customer history (including walk-ins, reservations, no-shows, complaints, and everything else) for every customer, plus, with the powerful notes and labeling feature, you can easily tag individual notes and reservations.

For example, if a customer complains about bad service: a text note is good (and is helpful when you look at the details of a specific transaction – so Save My Table still, of course, lets you take text notes). But – by labeling the note (in this case, perhaps, “Complaint” and “Bad Service”), it becomes filterable and instantly identifiable.

So, give our table management software for restaurant a try – we think you’ll love it.

Simple, Awesome, Powerful Wait List Management for Your Restaurant

Do you manage or own a restaurant? Do people sometimes have to wait for a table at your restaurant?

If you answered yes to these 2 questions, you might want to check out Save My Table, at www.savemytable.com.

Automated wait list management is one of their main features, along with SMS text message paging, automatic best-seat suggestions to your host staff, and visual dining room status monitoring.

If you want to give it a try, check out the 2-week free trial, with no credit card required.

Additional Fields Being Added to Reservation Widget

Do you want to know your restaurant guest’s dietary restrictions?

How about their special requests – beyond just a desired section, to include the ability for them to ask for extra high-chairs at this point?

It’s been something our restaurants have been asking about for a little bit now, and we’re now putting the finishing touches on it. The first release will contain the most oft-asked additions to the field list of the reservation widget.

The next version will actually be a fully fledged editable “form wizard” where you will be able to create your own fields, and map them to fields in your existing customer lists.

New Release comes hits browsers late tonight.

In keeping with our quest to a) keep making Save My Table better week in and week out, and b) to keep our uptime at (or within 0.5% of) 100% over the course of each and every month, we’re releasing the next build late tonight.

Our last blog post covered one detail of the new release, but I just thought I’d talk about a few of the other features and changes that are heading your way in a few hours! That is – if you’re a Save My Table restaurant. If not, might I suggest heading over to savemytable.com/signup and giving up a test-drive in your restaurant? It’s instant, and no credit card is required.

In addition to the new color coded table statuses at the forefront of the dining room view, we’re adding a more consistent, easier to understand, and faster to use (and override when necessary) reservation block choosing for restaurant hosts. Now, whatever day is selected, the first block all the way through to the last block displayed will be the opening and closing time of the restaurant – every single block will either be red (meaning unavailable) or green (meaning available). It’s super easy and fast for host-staff to take reservations.

Another addition is our “birthday and anniversary” e-mails. You can now create a birthday e-mail and tell Save My Table to send that e-mail to all people who have a birthday coming up in a settable number of days. Save My Table will send a daily e-mail hitting all those people who match the criteria each day. You can also create an anniversary e-mail, which works in the same way. Also, you can create as many of these “scheduled” e-mails as you’d like, so… for example, you could have one birthday e-mail that says (in brief) “Hi, Susan. We’re excited for your birthday in a week’s time! We’ll be sending you a present to celebrate.” and then another one that goes out on the day of people’s birthday that says “Hooray Susan! It’s your birthday! Come on into so-and-so restaurant and get 10% off today by brining this e-mail with you!”. Well – I’m sure you can come up with much better e-mails (and more beautiful, too, with our built-in design templates) – but you get the point.

Theres a few other more minor changes that we’ve made, but that hits the most important points in tonight’s release.

Our developers are well into next month’s release – and I’ll write more on that next week. It promises to be a really exciting one, with one major feature addition that we know lots of our restaurants will be truly excited by! (Sounds like the local news channel, huh?)

A change of table color

The latest version of Save My Table hits our restaurant’s browsers on the 30th of September. Man! It only feels like a few weeks since the last one. Oh wait – it is. We do a monthly build with new feature goodies and operation streamlines every month (and occasional small interim-releases every so often between those, too).

So, for people who are currently using our table management software, I’d like to touch on the biggest visual change we’re making in the upcoming release.

Table Color = Table Status

Seems like a small change, but it makes a pretty big difference to the “feel” of the host view. In prior releases, the table color has always represented the seating area in which the table resides (e.g. “outdoor seating”, etc.). We’re still indicating the seating area automatically with a small red “dot” in the top right of each table (and you can always draw semi-transparent borders behind the tables to represent entire seating areas, too). But now… when no guests are seated at a table it is white (blank), and as tables a filled, partially filled, and move through statuses (custom and built-in) they change color. This gives the host, bus staff, management, servers, well – everyone – an instant view of the current conditions at the restaurant, without having to click on individual tables or look at small status indicators to figure it out.

We’re going to be introducing some awesome new features in near-term releases also that compliment this new color system, and make it even more user-friendly and wonderful!

As always, if you don’t have a Save My Table account yet – we strongly recommend (completely unbiased of course! ) that you check our our instant free trial for restaurants, and give it a whirl.