Streamlining Restaurant Operations: 6 Reasons to Ditch Pen & Paper

Using a traditional pen and paper diary might seem easy. All your reservations are in one book, everyone can add in notes for service. It's simple. 

However, sometimes "simple" doesn't always guarantee success. Can a pen and paper diary calculate the best table and timeslot to ensure your restaurant is filled at all times to maximise profit? Can it send a notification on all staff to check important booking notes?

Leaving these things to chance can be a massive detriment to restaurant management. It can seriously slow down your staff and the daily operations of your business.

Here are the key reasons why you need to go digital and move to using restaurant technology and software in your business.

Why do you need to streamline your restaurant operations? 

Streamlining operations in the restaurant industry is vital to the long term success of any business. With streamlined operations, you can stay ahead of customer demand and ensure a smooth daily process, even during rush hours.

With the help of hospitality technology solutions you can stay ahead of customer demand, never miss a booking, prevent no shows, and reduce cancellations. You’ll also save time on admin tasks, like chasing confirmations, pre-orders, and deposits.

Taking these steps allows you to create more positive customer experiences. With less wasted time, your team can focus on your customers and deliver outstanding customer experiences.  

A streamlined system can lead to better service and happier customers. With the help of the additional data captured by digital systems, you can create stronger and more personalised relationships with your customers and upscale their experience at every stage of their visit,.  resulting in more delighted diners.

Remember, an unsatisfied customer is more likely to leave a bad review than a happy one. A study in the UK has suggested that two thirds of online consumer reviews are negative, while this Australian report states that customers are much more likely to leave a review if their experience has been negative rather than positive.

With smoother workflows, you can help your entire team to operate more efficiently. Benefits can range from reducing the wait for walk-in diners and missed phone bookings, to cutting down on admin and minimising human error.

Achieving these benefits becomes much easier when streamlining your business with an online booking system like ResDiary. From allowing your entire team to access critical booking data, to accepting reservations more smoothly, digital booking systems are key to optimising your restaurant operations.

Curious about just how much you could save with an online booking system? Check out our value calculator to better understand the return on investment offered in making the switch from a pen and paper system to ResDiary.

6 reasons to ditch pen and paper systems and streamline your restaurant

Here are six reasons to leave behind your paper diary and make the switch to a table management system.

1. Ease of use and time saving

By transitioning from a pen and paper system to a digital booking and table management solution, you can make your general business management much easier. Your booking and table information will be available to all your staff in service. With cloud functionality offered by systems like ResDiary, your team can access all the information they need from desktop, mobile, or tablet apps.

You won’t have to spend valuable time looking through a booking diary to find the information your employees need. You also won’t risk that someone didn’t immediately write down valuable details when a booking was made.

Without streamlining your bookings, your restaurant can run into the following issues:

• Bottlenecks in service and an uneven spread of bookings throughout service
• Being unprepared for dinner rushes and busy periods.
• Losing track of orders and special requests, resulting in unhappy  customers.
• Failing to stock appropriately.
• Losing track of how long jobs and operations are taking.
• Miscommunicating between the front of house staff and the kitchen.
• Dealing with consistently unhappy customers.
• Missing out on booking opportunities (and revenue) via phone, social media, Google, and other online channels.

Any time staff spend on administration and booking is time they can’t serve your customers. Falling behind during a rush period puts your venue at risk of creating a cycle of unsatisfied diners. 

Comparatively, with an online booking system, all your vital information is in one place. From bookings to what promotions are selling the best, your entire staff have one easy location to find every detail they need to do the best possible job. 

2. Control the flow of bookings

ResDiary’s online reservation system features smart rules to automate your booking process. With ResDiary’s smart rules, you can set exactly what availability guests can see when they make a booking.

You can set rules on how you accept online  bookings and walk-ins by time slot, service, cover volume, and even by booking channel. Then, ResDiary ensures you don’t accept any bookings that break the rules you have set. In addition, you can create smart rules to ensure specific tables are booked first.

It’s also simple for you as the operator to “break” your rules during a given period. This process is simple, and users with the correct access privileges - like shift managers - have the flexibility to do this.

If you are short-staffed, automated booking rules will ensure you quickly and effectively control your customer flow. This is in stark contrast to businesses relying on pen and paper systems. With analogue systems, there’s no way to exercise this level of automated control.

Another powerful tool ResDiary offers is segments. Segments allow you to change aspects of your diary during a given period.

For example, if you are opening up an outdoor space in summer, you can automatically reflect this change in your booking diary. Customers will see these changes when they go to make a booking, and your team can see them when they look at your diary.

You can then easily switch your diary back to normal when the time comes. When summer comes around again, you can revert your diary back to it's  summer segment, on the dates of your choosing and your summer set up is complete. You can do this for any holiday or special service. This is another level of control that analogue systems cannot match.

3. More booking functions

ResDiary’s booking system offers many other features to make your life easier. No-shows are a costly and disruptive issue in any restaurant business.

With ResDiary, you can send automated booking reminders and confirmations to customers to ensure they attend, edit, or cancel if they need to. You can also use the Stripe integration to set up credit card detail storage, deposits, or full payment in advance to ensure customers honour their reservations.

ResDiary’s booking functions are accessible on multiple devices, and front of house staff can quickly and easily find diners' bookings. Back of house staff will also be able to access vital booking information when they need to.  This helps your entire team commit to the guest experience.

With quick access to information from anywhere in your business, your staff can adjust to changes and bookings on the fly. Additionally, ResPhone by ResDiary can automatically accept bookings when your team can’t answer the phone and can help you store customers' phone numbers.

ResDiary also features W8List™ to manage walk-in customers with ease. With these booking tools at your disposal, your business will be running more smoothly than ever.

4.  Features and integrations

ResDiary offers more than just booking tools. It also empowers you to take your advertising to the next level by using customer information to personalise your marketing.

Create branded emails and text messages tailored to your customers’ data. Automatically promote set menus, special events, and marketing deals, like wine tastings or birthday dinners.

Automatic marketing features let you attract more customers without slowing down your business or reassigning staff. Create special promotions to advertise your business when you know there may be fewer customers, like during winter or outside peak tourist seasons.

ResDiary integrates with Silverstreet to automatically send SMS messages based on rules that you set. You can also rely on customer relationship management integrations like TalkBox or Acteol to get even deeper insights into your customers. Remember that personalised marketing is effective marketing.

Are you pursuing social media and search engine marketing for your restaurant? ResDiary integrates with Meta and Google to allow you to take bookings directly from these channels into your digital diary. This makes it easy to convert diners who see your marketing efforts into paying customers.

These vital marketing tools are extremely effective when paired with booking data from your diary. From simple contact information to dining preferences, marketing through your restaurant reservation system is an effective way to attract customers to your business.

5. Take advantage of other integrations

With the right software and integration capabilities, you can turn your restaurant into a well-oiled machine. When it comes to reservation software, new tech should never slow you down or create extra work.

ResDiary’s software integrates seamlessly with your current restaurant management processes. We don’t create new tasks; we automate old ones so you have more time for what matters.

You can use an electronic point of sale (EPOS) software integration to reliably accept payments, monitor your inventory levels and much more. Tools like SumUp EPOS or PowerEPOS from Triniteq offer a range of useful features on top of securely accepting payments.

If your restaurant is part of a hotel or inn, we offer a range of property management systems (PMS) which integrate effectively with ResDiary. Systems like Guestline allow you to create, edit and cancel bookings within a single platform. You can also link table reservations with hotel bookings, saving on admin time.

There are so many advantages to integrating your restaurant reservation system with these kinds of tools. Most importantly, you can use two-way data flow to get the most out of each and every one of them.

With a pen and paper system, you aren’t empowered to use integrations like these. This means you can put off gaining advantages from integrated EPOS systems and CRM systems. A digital system like ResDiary is the perfect entry point to a world of valuable integrations, with over 70 leading integrations available.

6. Analyse your booking data for decision-making

Every point of data you gather for your business can benefit your operations. By analysing your booking data you can see where you may have an operational inefficiency. You can learn more about your peak days and how you can maximise value from them.

ResDiary offers a digital suite for analysing a broad array of restaurant data. It enables you to make more informed decisions on where your restaurant needs to improve, and what your top opportunities are. By sticking with a pen and paper system, you will be in the dark when it comes to these insights.

ResDiary also allows you to gather customer data such as contact information to put to work in your marketing efforts. You can offer more personalised service with easy-to-use booking notes.

If you want to add a personal touch to your customer service while relying on a pen and paper system, you’re reliant on the team member answering the phone and writing information down. Digital systems offer a far more reliable way to achieve customised service.

Using booking data can be as simple as opening up your digital diary during a pre-shift meeting and sharing insights to help your team prepare. With a digital system, your team members can access this information before and during service.

Digital reservation systems allow you to put your data to work in a way that pen and paper systems simply cannot match.

Streamline your restaurant operations and make more money with ResDiary

ResDiary is the perfect tool to streamline your venue’s operations and level up your business. When we help automate the most tiresome parts of running your business, you’ll have more time to engage with your customers.

Our wide array of integrations allows you to attract more customers, process sales more easily and much more. It’s a level of control and ease no pen and paper system can offer.

Streamline your business for a faster, better workplace. Ditch your paper diary and make the switch to ResDiary today.