Across the UK, no-reservation restaurants have become the norm and often involve being told to get a drink at the bar or go elsewhere while you wait for a table to free up. However, this brings about both advantages and disadvantages for restaurants looking to have quick table turnarounds.
According to the Telegraph, the advantages for these types of restaurants are obvious:
- No faffing around with bookings (or losing profit when groups fail to turn up), and;
- A long queue that acts as a human advert to passers-by: “Look how popular we are!” But the public aren’t always so keen to spend the first chunk of their evening outside in the cold.
However, queues for service and waiting times often lead to an increase in the number of complaints, negative write-ups and customers going elsewhere to eat.
What is being done about this to overcome this issue?
In London’s hottest restaurants, customers are being placed in a virtual queue and texted as a table becomes available thanks to the Qudini virtual queue management platform.
Qudini’s queue management app is an intuitive tablet, smartphone, and desktop-based platform that enables restaurant hosts to seamlessly manage customers requesting tables, and communicate with them via text once tables are ready.
This replaces your restaurant’s clipboards, or physical queues with one simple app that allows you to:
- Improve customer experience and loyalty.
- Increase staff efficiency and turn tables faster.
- Reduce open tables and seat more customers.
- Capture customer and operational data.
This enables chains such as Honest Burgers to be able to serve 300 guests a day, six days a week.
How are restaurants such as Honest Burgers beating the queue?
Here’s how:
“Our customers love Qudini’s system! Logging in from the pub and seeing your place in the queue update live seems to be very addictive.”
“We’ve always felt that the best restaurants are the ones that strive for transparency, from sourcing the ingredients and cooking the food, right through to the service. Qudini’s queuing system means our customers can see what we see when we ask them to wait for 2 hours, all from the comfort of the pub! They’ve turned queuing into something easy, pain free and charming!” Phillip Eeeles, Founder, Honest Burgers
Find out more information about our virtual queuing system or our appointment booking system.