SerVme supports restaurants and F&B concepts of all sizes. But how does each restaurant type use SerVme? This is a series we’re working on.
The first in this series is how hotel F&B concepts use SerVme.
From managing reservations and shifts to CRM management and improving operations, to increasing sales and profits, there are many ways hotel restaurants use SerVme.
One of the top reasons hotel F&B concepts use SerVme is our integration with hotel property management systems (PMS) like Opera.
The PMS integration supports F&B hosts in several ways:
1. Eliminate Pen and Paper: When an in-house hotel guest visits the all-day dining restaurant, hosts will easily checkin the guest who have paid for the bed and breakfast. Servme eliminates the need to export the daily room data from Opera and digitizes the F&B report completely.
2. Streamline Restaurant Bookings: When an in-house guest calls to make a reservation for lunch or dinner, the host can easily search for the room number and find the profile in Servme to add a booking, thus avoiding to create a new profile. Reservation agents pull the guests’ data such as number of nights booked, meal plans, booking or membership type, and can assign bills to room numbers.. directly from Servme!
3. Review in-house and outside guests: Using the PMS integration, hosts can see if a guest is a hotel guest or an outside guest. This helps them create new guest profiles, update old ones, and personalize the guest experience to create a memorable meal.
4. Marketing using guest tags: Through the PMS integration and Servme, hotel marketing managers can send email and SMS messages to in-house guests using the guest tag feature.
Every successful restaurant wants more guests and more dishes ordered. In other words, they need to increase reservations and footfall to boost monthly revenues.
SerVme helps hotel F&B concepts do exactly that in several ways. Here’s how.
CRM, guest profiling, and segmentation
Getting to know your guests better is the best way to provide personalized digital and in-person dining experiences.
With SerVme’s restaurant CRM software, hotels can create and manage a detailed digital guest book for each guest. Information can include seating preferences, allergies, dietary restrictions, latest visits, guest reviews and comments, value of past checks, among other details.
Use the auto-tagging feature to add criteria to identify your frequent visitors, VIP guests, top-spenders, frequent no-shows, among others.
With SerVme’s CRM, marketing managers and reservation agents can automate their restaurant’s marketing activities. They can create campaigns using the email and SMS marketing platform.
Personalized email and SMS campaigns
With SerVme, you don’t have to subscribe to multiple software platforms to manage your marketing campaigns. SerVme offers a marketing platform for creating, managing, and automating email and SMS campaigns.
Whether you want to create a restaurant newsletter or run email campaigns, you can do so using SerVme.
Use the auto-tagging feature to segment your guests and personalize communication with them.
Build guest retention, increase sales, unveil new dishes and menus, and more using SerVme’s ready email and SMS templates.
You can easily review email analytics such as open rates, click-through rates (CTR), and others from your SerVme dashboard.
Further reading: 10+ Restaurant Email Marketing Campaign Ideas for Better Sales & Retention
Upselling dishes to guests
Hotel restaurants can have all their guest data and previous payment details in one place via the point-of-sale (POS) systems for restaurants and F&B concepts.
When guests return to your restaurant, your hosts can see their previous orders and how they rated their last dining experience. They can use that information to recommend dishes and beverages.
Your hosts can also get more information directly from guests about their preferences for better future dining experiences.
Learning that your guests Sarah and Andrew are vegetarians lets your servers quickly highlight top dishes for them.
Hotel F&B concepts benefit from SerVme’s payment integrations, allowing them to collect various online payments from interested guests.
Increasing revenues through online payments
With SerVme, hotel restaurants can get more revenues by
Enabling full in-advance payments
Collecting deposits and reservation fees
Collecting cancellation and no-show fees
Restaurants can also send payment reminders to guests.
With reminders and no-show and cancellation fees, hotel restaurants can also reduce the number of no-shows.
Using the SerVme booking widget, hotel F&B concepts can showcase and upsell upcoming dining events up to 3 months in-advance.
Increase revenue with marketing integrations
Besides payments, SerVme offers an array of marketing integrations that hotels use to get more online bookings.
These integrations include
Reserve with Google (commission-free)
Direct bookings via Facebook and Instagram (commission-free)
Bookings via Tripadvisor, Zomato, and others (commission-based)
SerVme helps hotel F&Bs with operation management in multiple ways. From shift management and cover flow to generating reports to managing online and offline reservations, among others.
Seating and table management
One of the top reasons restaurants turn to SerVme’s table management software is for table, and seating management, both online and on-premise.
Whether you’re running special events, serving special menus, or have limited seating, the SerVme widget helps your hosts and guests.
Managing seating and reservations can be a hassle if only a handful can open, close, and block tables. It can also be a hassle if there are too many people.
As a restaurant manager or F&B director, you can improve operations by controlling your restaurant's capacity. You can easily manage online inventory from popular booking channels.
One of our 2023 feature updates involved adding more roles managers can assign to control the restaurant's capacity. These roles are:
Super Admin
Admin
Group manager
Brand manager
Outlet manager
Reservation manager
Host/Hostess
Group account
The super admin can decide which of these roles (or all of them) can block and unblock tables and sections for reservations.
For example, if you have several prime locations in your restaurant, you may choose to unblock those tables from being booked online so walk-ins can get them faster.
Alternatively, you can block those tables for reservations but add a reservation fee or cancellation fee to reduce no-show guests and ensure your day’s revenue from those tables.
Waitlist management
SerVme helps restaurants manage online and on-ground waitlists for walk-in guests.
The waitlist management software can also help build your restaurant’s CRM by collecting guest information.
Marketing managers can later use this information to automate sending guest surveys and SMS and restaurant email marketing campaigns.
Floor planning
Besides blocking tables, hotels use SerVme to manage their restaurant floor plans.
Whether it’s to combine tables or accommodate large groups, or revamp seating arrangements, SerVme’s floor planning features are dynamic and super easy to use.
Feature update
We’ve recently added more features to our floor planning software. Now, restaurant managers and hosts don’t have to guess which tables can be combined without blocking entry or exits. They can quickly see which tables they can combine to accommodate groups of 3, 4, 10, or any number.
All they have to do is enter the number of people they want to combine tables for and SerVme’s software will show them the best seating options for this group.
Better communication with Manager’s Notes
For a restaurant manager to ensure operations flow seamlessly, they need to communicate with their staff.
Sometimes, there’s a special event for the day and restaurant managers need to communicate updates or share notes. Remind servers that a special digital menu is available for this event.
Sometimes, it’s about reservations made, seating arrangements for large groups or corporate events. Or something else.
Are they getting VIP guests today? Is there a special event at the Italian restaurant, which means they may need more servers there? Are new dishes appearing on today’s special menu?
SerVme’s Manager’s Notes feature does exactly that. Restaurant managers can create and schedule notes and share them with servers in a restaurant.
Each restaurant in a hotel gets its notes independently from others, so there’s no worry about a mix-up.
Manage server shifts and cover flow
Managing server shifts and restaurant cover flow are among the top headaches for any restaurant manager.
SerVme makes it easier for restaurants to manage shifts and cover flow from within their dashboard. They don’t need another app or software to manage server shifts.
Restaurant managers can see which days have the largest number of bookings using the SerVme dashboard. This makes it easier to determine the number of needed covers and manage servers’ shifts accordingly.
Events management & upselling
Hotel restaurants are known for their private and unique fine dining experiences. Especially their recurring special nights with specialty foods, music, and overall memorable dining events.
Hotel F&Bs regularly use SerVme to get reservations across their dining locations. Whether it’s a seaside restaurant, a special 3-hour cruise, or even game night at their in-house bar.
Hotel and non-hotel guests can make restaurant bookings using the SerVme widget, which shows them available sections, times, and dates.
F&B concepts can customize their widget design for each dining event, add details about dress code, reservation and cancellation policies, among others. They can also add links to their digital menus and collect deposits, reservation fees, and full upfront payments using SerVme.
Hotels also use the widget to upsell upcoming dining events by showcasing them on the widget.
Digital menus for hotel F&B concepts
Hotel F&B concepts regularly use SerVme’s digital menu feature. It allows them to create various digital menus including event-specific menus, seasonal menus, beverage menus, and so on.
Restaurants can easily design and highlight special and limited-time dishes and beverages to increase their sales and revenues.
If you have multiple menus, a quick scan of your QR code will show the guest the menu options available for their meal.
As a restaurant, you can choose to enable certain menus during specific hours or days.
As a restaurant manager, if you notice several guests are vegetarians or vegans, you can create digital menus for these guests. You can also add new dishes to suit your guests’ palates and easily upsell those dishes to them during their next visit.
For example, if one of your guests is listed as ‘vegan’ and your hotel has a vegan digital menu, you can instantly share your vegan menu. The guest no longer has to go through lots of dishes that they can’t eat.
Final words
As you can see, all of SerVme’s features feed into each other. The guest CRM supports reservation and waitlist management and helps restaurants create email and SMS campaigns. The floor planning and table management features complement each other and so on.
Not only that, but the CRM can be centralized across concepts in the same hotel or across hotels under the same brand.
At SerVme, we’re constantly working on adding new features to support hotels with their restaurants, bars, beaches, and even cruises. We’re also constantly working on updating features to ensure restaurant management is a piece of cake.
If you’d like to know more or see SerVme in action, book a quick call with us to see how SerVme can help your hotel create dining experiences that keep guests coming back.
Mohammed Rafy
Operations
