The best in hospitality tech

While there’s much debate over the usefulness of QR codes for customer orders, Leah Foster, CFO of the Palmer Hospitality Group, says they’ve allowed staff in their Adelaide venues to improve customer service.

“It allows you to change your focus – instead of selling the product to a customer, the staff can focus on the experience,” she says.

“We can use the limited face-to-face time to ask how the meal was, what we could do better and essentially get a review right there, instead of selling the product.”

From streamlining ordering to food and recipe planning, many chefs swear by Cooking The Books.

“We use Cooking The Books for our recipes because everything is online and all the chefs have access to it – anyone can look up a recipe at any time,” says Harvi Singh, co-owner of Common Ground Cafes in Sydney’s Marrickville and Hurstville.

“You link it to your suppliers too, so if there’s a change in produce prices it adjusts the food costs. It saves a lot of comparisons.”

Square has been one of the single biggest game-changers in the hospitality space, useful for far more than point of sale.

“Our website is through Square, our POS system, our table ordering machines and payments too – so everything is very streamlined,” Singh says.

You can also use Square to create customer profiles, recording their dining history and preferences, and reward them with loyalty programs.

Google is the natural starting place for many customers looking to make a restaurant booking, so it makes sense that customers can book straight from it, using WowApps.

“It integrates with Google search and customers can directly book a table or order food from the search page, instead of navigating to our website,” Singh says.

“This effectively removes unnecessary steps for the end consumer. It’s very immediate and very functional.”

There’s no shortage of choices for restaurants wanting to streamline reservations, but Foster likes SevenRooms best.

“We chose SevenRooms specifically because it had a really good ticketing system – it was built for nightclubs predominantly, and a couple of our venues have large ticketed events,” she explains.

“We couldn’t find anything else on the market piecing it all together. We had about four or five products trying to do the one job, and we could see that Seven Rooms had all of the abilities to do those things,”

The other bonus of Seven Rooms is that it integrates seamlessly with other systems, such as payroll.