At WizButler, we believe that we need to address the core issue facing your business, making your business more efficient and more autonomous to increase your revenue and reduce your costs in tangible and measurable ways and not slick marketing campaigns about aspects of your business that are not core elements. In fact, the more complex your operation and the busier your service is the more you need the benefits WizButler offers.
That is why we have solved your core booking, operational and revenue management issues and provide you with the tools and time savings so that you can focus on customer service, building your brand and attracting and building direct relationships with customers so that they are yours and do not “belong” to a “middle-man” booking platform.
WizButler, is the ultimate system, as it makes hard tasks you currently do manually easy!
That is why we recommend when doing your research for a new restaurant booking system, be diligent, seek proof for claims made, do thorough research and you will find WizButler is the right solution for you.
The common representations made by other restaurant booking platforms that you should consider carefully include:
1. Made by hospitality professionals for hospitality professionals
You should not be misled by the marketing referring to things like booking systems being “made by hospitality professionals for hospitality professionals.” The only thing that matters is the benefits that they can deliver to your business, nothing more. The questions are therefore simple: can they autonomously optimise your online bookings, can they manage your online allocations properly, do they save you time so that you do not need to manually reallocate bookings, do they provide completely autonomous waitlist standby and no-show functionality just to name few requirements that would transform your business? WizButler can!
2. Guests’ experiences
Never be impressed by gimmicks such as systems proposing to deliver “guest experiences” which simply rely on manual tags, manual searches and gimmicky emails being sent after the event. Tags, searches and emails are simply administrative tools that are not important enough to highlight as major features in optimising your bookings and revenue. For example, did you know that existing restaurant booking systems use search algorithms and allocation processes that can easily reject bookings when you are only 60% to 65% full, as they are incapable of rearranging existing bookings to accommodate the new bookings? Rejecting bookings and revenue when you are only 60% to 65% full is not compensated by manual tags and gimmicky emails. Irrespective, WizButler does offer its own built-in CRM, tags, emails and newsletters as part of bringing you the most complete restaurant system in the world.
3. Marketing your restaurant
It is an exaggeration for booking systems to promise to market your restaurant and bring you more customers when they focus on offering loyalty programs targeted to their brand and to their booking platform and not your restaurant. What’s even worse is they charge you a fee for reservations for people that were looking for your restaurant, to begin with. Our experience has shown that your restaurant’s online bookings will increase when you stop using these marketing platforms as you cut out the “middle man” who has a different agenda. A significant benefit of the WizButler autonomous system is that it brings you free time so that you can focus on getting the critical things right like customer service and the tools to market your venues, like promotional tracking, newsletters and targeted campaigns.
4. Drag and Drop functionality for manual booking reallocations
Do not be swayed by systems that promote their “Drag and Drop” feature as something that is amazing and can save you a lot of time. Drag and Drop functionality is only beneficial when your booking system is incapable of doing things properly and you are required to fix up the allocation mess made by your booking system. Further, Drag and Drop features are inefficient. For example, the Drag and Drop feature allows you to put a booking for 10 people on a table of two, it allows the booking that is being displaced by the Drag and Drop to conflict with another booking, plus the process is incapable of intelligently reallocating the displaced booking.
Simply put, “Drag and drop” is only of benefit in situations where the booking system is incapable of optimising the bookings and you are required to do this manually by trial and error if a booking has been taken and not rejected.
With WizButler’s autonomous online real-time dynamic booking optimisation booking requests are properly re-arranged and re-allocated with tables added, tables removed and tables rearranged instantly and immediately displayed on your dynamic floor plan. As such, there is no need for a manual “drag and drop” feature as the hard work is already done for you, plus WizButler does not reject bookings when your dining room is only 60% – 65% full.
5. Integrations
All booking systems, refer to their long list of integrations with other restaurant systems. However, very few, if any, of these integrations are completely autonomous requiring you to manually maintain the integrity of those integrations. With your limited time and use of valuable resources, you do not have the time to manually keep all these promoted integrations current and updated each time you make a change to your operations. As such, these integrations add no real value to your business.
Like everything else, ask how you set up these integrations and what the process is to maintain the integration links if you change your operations, like opening hours, booking constraints, menus offered, etc. Are you required to maintain two databases and where each database does not offer you a complete picture of all your data? WizButler offers you a complete solution with one system, one database and everything at your fingertips.
6. Data
The ownership of the data relating to your customers has been a hot topic for many years. Hence, most questions surrounding “your customers’ data” have been asked such as; Where is the data stored? How can I get access to the data? How can I search and analyse the data?
The approach by WizButer is simple, it is your data, stored in your own data area and you can access and analyse it at any time at your convenience.
7. Fees
Some booking platforms market that you only need to pay a fixed fee with no hidden charges for per person booking fees. Plus, most booking platforms offer different subscription tiers such as “basic,” “standard” and “professional” supposedly to better meet the needs of individual restaurants.
Don’t be tricked, whether you are a 50-seat restaurant, a 200-seat restaurant or a 500-seat restaurant you are dealing with the same problems and the same issues as everyone else. In fact, if you are only a 50-seat restaurant you probably have fewer resources than a 500-seat restaurant so the last thing you need is a booking system with less functionality. In fact, there is a strong argument that smaller restaurants need more systems automation than large restaurants. For large restaurants, the need for better systems, more efficient systems, automation and autonomous systems are more evident simply because of their scale. In your review of the right booking system if you are a small restaurant, don’t think you do not need or can survive without certain key features or if you are a large restaurant that you can supplement the system manually, you can’t.
The right system for you is the system that will deliver the most cost-effective benefits to you, not the cheapest system or the most popular system. Be prudent, take your time and make the right choice for you.
WizButler is the only dynamic booking system, offers the only dynamic allocation system, the only system that can add tables, remove tables and rearrange tables to maximise your revenue, reducing your need for telephone bookings and associated staff costs as well as staff costs associated with manual reallocations and preparing a table layout for staff as to how to set up the dining room.
WizButler’s pricing model is a simple monthly flat fee of only $99 for your own database and use of the fully-featured WizButler booking system. Then a simple charge of only 5 cents per person for the dynamic allocation processes which use far more resources than the static allocation processes of other booking platforms. With WizButler, your fee will only increase when you get busier and when you get busier, the benefits of the WizButler autonomous system become even bigger and more important!
Summary
At WizButler, our policy is to encourage you to examine, understand and compare the different booking platforms {Seven Room, Open table, Resdiary, Now Book It, The Fork and Resy} and ordering systems {Me and U, Mr. Yum and Hungry Hungry} currently available so that you can make the best decision. In this regard, we are a bit shellfish, as we know WizButler is not only the best booking system in the world, it is also the most complete and fully featured and configurable restaurant system in the world that not only meets your current needs but your future needs as well.
Call us for a demo to appreciate the difference WizButler can bring to your venue!