Your Restaurant Is Losing Money From Phone Bookings Every Day

As a restaurant owner you will be fully aware that running anything less than a tight ship results in chaos, missed potential and loss of profits.
Clearing the tables and setting them for the next guests, the peeled and chopped ingredients ready to hand to the chef, the speed at which the bill can be calculated at the end of the meal: these are all small details which completed hundreds of times each week can add up to hours of inefficiency and loss of profit.

Taking phone bookings

Another regular task you may not have considered: the time it takes for staff to answer phone bookings. Dealing with phone bookings may only take a minute or two, but consider: how many phone bookings a day does your restaurant take? Five? Ten? Twenty?
Let’s say your restaurant has ten phone bookings a day, it takes 90 seconds for the staff to deal with the booking, and the staff are paid on average $/£/€10 an hour.
The cost per day of taking the booking would be $/£/€ 2.50 per day.
If you take the same amount of bookings every day for a month, the cost would be $/£/€ 75 per month and $/£/€800 per year.

Hundreds of dollars loss per month

Of course these costs are assumptions. It may take your staff less time to take phone bookings. You may take fewer phone bookings than this per day.
But then again, it may take your staff longer than 90 seconds to take a phone booking. And you may take even more than 10 phone bookings.
If so, it is possible that phone bookings could be costing your restaurant$/£/€1000s, or even more, in time per year.
Not only is this cost inefficient, it is also hours of time that is taken away from being spent on your customer’s dining experience.

Online restaurant booking

Before phoning a restaurant to book, most diners will check first to see if there’s an online booking option.
Setting up online booking may seem daunting, or cost time you can’t afford to take away from your restaurant, but if you join simpleERB we take care of that for you.
It takes just 30 minutes to get your tables ready to book and we provide you with widgets so your customers can book on your website, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Of course, there will always be customers who will prefer to phone their bookings in. But providing them with the option to book online takes away the number who will need to do so.
So your staff can spend their time away from the phone and on the customer’s dining experience.