Kitchen Automation Leads to Increased Sales and Customer Satisfaction

6/13/2012
Dishoom in London’s trendy Covent Garden, pays homage to Bombay’s disappearing Irani CafÉs. Since its launch in July 2010, Dishoom has been very successful. It seats 160 covers, but on a Saturday it regularly welcomes over 650 customers. However, this level of success bred its own problems. The hosts managing the tables often had to guess at wait times which meant some customers were unhappy and, worst case, walked away.  Dishoom needed to find a better way to manage capacity and contacted Call Systems Technology (CST) for a solution.
 
CST recommended the ConnectSmart technology from QSR. When the QSR ConnectSmart Hostess (Hostess) was coupled with the kitchen display part of the system ConnectSmart Kitchen (CSK), Dishoom had a complete solution to its capacity management challenge. The QSR ConnectSmart system provides the tools to meet guests’ needs better, improving table turnover and increased profits
 
What’s different about Hostess is that it learns how a restaurant works to provide accurate wait times and also draws data from the kitchen, via CSK. In the kitchen, each chef station has its own CSK screen. Using vivid, easy-to-understand graphical displays and information from waiting staff, the CSK software automatically assigns menu items to individual chef workstations.   It looks at the entire order to make sure everything gets to the food pass at the same time, ensuring the best possible quality when it is taken to the table. For example, if one table orders both curry and grills, it tells the curry chef to start work a few minutes after the grill chef, since the curry takes less time. The CSK also alerts managers not only when an order is cooked, but also what stage it is at during cooking, so they can easily check how a table’s order is doing. 
 
Out front, Hostess features a screen mounted in the front desk, which displays each table’s status – including meal stage information from the CSK - and gives live wait time information. Staff can tell at a glance what is happening.  
 
Another aspect of being over-busy was that, despite queues and a packed bar, there would often be empty tables because staff couldn’t find the party it was allocated to, or were tied up doing other things.    
 
CST also supplied Dishoom with pagers for guests and for managers. The CustomerCall pagers are given to guests who choose to go into the bar while they wait for a table. When the table is ready, the fully interfaced Hostess system sends an alert to the pager, telling the guest to make their way to the front desk.    
 
The management pagers are linked to the ConnectSmart system as well. For example, if a new party is seated at a table and not seen within two minutes, the system warns the manager so that they can see what is wrong. Likewise, if a table isn’t cleared within a short time after a party has left the system generates an alert. And if a table’s order is held up for some reason, it tells the managers so they can go and speak to the customers and make sure they are happy.   

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