26 Feb, 2024
If you want to capitalise on all the benefits of hosting restaurant events in your venue, you need a comprehensive software solution to help. ResDiary offers event enquiry management, branded communications, pre-payment functionality and much more.
Keep reading to learn more about how ResDiary can help your business on the path to event management success.
Benefits of hosting restaurant events
Restaurant events are a fantastic way for your business to grow and expand. Benefits of restaurant events include:
- Increased Revenue: Hosting events in your restaurant can generate extra revenue for your business. From birthday celebrations to large corporate dinners, special events are often excellent sources of income, as customers are prepared to spend big on a special night.
- Increased Brand Exposure: Successful events can help to increase the profile of your business. They give you the chance to serve large parties of customers and deliver a brilliant experience. This generates improved word of mouth marketing for your business.
- Increased Customer Loyalty: Building solid bonds with your customers is arduous, but with successful events, it can be effortless. Restaurant events can help you foster loyal customers.
Thrive with ResDiary's Event Management Features
ResDiary’s event management software offers many features to aid your event planning process. We aim to ensure you have the best event management experience with all these features in one software.
To learn more about ResDiary's Event Management tools, please view the video.
1. Take event enquiries online
Taking event enquiries online has become even more typical for restaurants and often preferred by diners since COVID. This can present issues for businesses that still use more analogue systems.
With ResDiary, you can integrate your enquiries into your restaurant's website with customisable widgets. You can create your own event types to make the process easier and capture customers’ wanting to book private event spaces for their special days, like birthdays or private dinners.
2. Personalise your booking form for event questions
Asking the right questions at the right time is critical for booking forms. One way to unlock this is by personalising your booking form with event questions. Remember that the more you ask, the more you learn how to make your customers’ experience unforgettable.
Tailoring the booking form to allow customers to choose the type of event they’re planning or make special requests is the perfect way to elevate their experience.
3. Internally assign events to individual staff members
At ResDiary, we help to ensure that your roster stays on track when managing events. Our internal assignment of events to staff members allows you to share your workload by selecting team members and assigning them to work on special events. This takes some of the stress out of event management, knowing everything is operating efficiently and managing restaurant staff is made a little bit easier.
4. Easy-to-use event management screen
Last-minute changes to events can impact your revenue, disrupt operations, and stress staff members.
Our user-friendly event management screen offers a convenient way to handle these changes. You can track an event’s status as it progresses through your booking process. Any changes that arise are easily dealt with thanks to this intuitive system.
5. Be confident with conflict-free bookings
Overbooking and scheduling conflicts can be disastrous for your business. They lead to dissatisfied guests and a loss of revenue.
That's why our event management software offers a seamless, conflict-free booking experience. You can easily see your events alongside other bookings and prevent clashes from occurring.
6. Add custom menus to event types
A recent YouGov survey revealed that 66% of Australians identify themselves as meat-eaters, while 19% are flexitarians, 6% are vegetarians and vegans, and 5% are pescetarians. With such a diverse range of dietary preferences, catering to each guest's needs can be demanding.
With ResDiary, you can enrich your guests' experience with custom menus tailored to different event types. They can be extremely useful in private events or birthday celebrations where customers have communicated dietary needs.
Even without dietary considerations, this feature is still a useful way to create customised menus for private events, including set course menus or special birthday packages.
7. Make your chefs happy with menu pre-orders
Chefs are the backbone of any restaurant. Pre-ordered menus can be a superb way to ease chefs' workloads and guarantee that guests receive their preferred dishes.
ResDiary's pre-order menu option improves' time management, reduces wait times, increases inventory control, and, most importantly, boosts customer and staff satisfaction.
8. Have peace of mind with pre-payments
No-shows can be a major issue for hospitality businesses, especially when you have reserved a large space for a special event. Reducing the damage with ResDiary is just a click away.
Our pre-payments over the phone, in person or online will give you peace of mind about no-shows. Protect your business against no-shows by encouraging or requiring customers to put down money ahead of time.
9. Easily customise event documentation
ResDiary's event management software can assist your event planners in producing documents using event details. All the key details of an event can be easily exported for internal use or to be distributed among your customers.
This makes it easy to send out informative emails to attendees or to quickly assemble the important data for your team.
10. Send personalised emails and alerts
Sending personalised emails and alerts is a hospitality superpower. Our personalised emails and alerts feature can help you get client feedback, remind customers about upcoming events and invite them to come back in the future.
For more information, check out our complete email marketing guide for restaurants.
11. Analyse your success with events reporting
With ResDiary events reporting, you’ll be able to track the progress of all your events, report on conversion rates, and understand unexpected spending. This provides a crucial perspective on your business, allowing you to host more successful events in the future.
Trust a restaurant’s opinion!
Not sure if ResDiary’s event management is right for you? Here’s a real-life example of what happened when one restaurant owner made the switch from OpenTable to ResDiary.
“Function enquiries have definitely increased because OpenTable did not have an events or functions feature, only group bookings. But with ResDiary there is the option to customise different event types so people can choose exactly what their event is,”
Max, licensee of Stanley’s Bar in Sydney
Why integrate event management with booking software?
There are plenty of benefits that come with integrating event management with other restaurant management software features:
- Easier management: With features prepayment, conflict-free bookings, and internally assigning staff members to events, managing your events with the help of an integrated booking platform is far simpler.
- Superior customer experience: Integration event management with a booking system makes things easier for your customers, too. They can place their booking and manage their event details with greater simplicity, leading to improved customer satisfaction.
- Increased marketing opportunities: Booking management software like ResDiary offers extensive marketing features including automated communications and customisable emails.
How to implement ResDiary Event Manager
When you invest in ResDiary software, you get all the tools you need to effectively implement it in your venue. You’ll have a direct line to our team to customise our software to your venue’s needs.
We also provide training videos to get your staff up to speed. You can also access our support desk for all the help you need to tackle any issue that arises.
Investing in ResDiary is the perfect way to start streamlining event management in your venue.
Book a demo today and uncover all the ways that ResDiary can boost your business.
