A couple of months ago, my husband and I visited our favorite crepe place in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. It is an hour from where we live and Wolfville is a university area. You wouldn’t expect a lot of tech savvy places there. A popular destination between the spring and fall seasons. The eateries are small places but crowded during these months. So, when we were told that there was a wait time, it didn’t surprise me. However this time though, they said we now can message you when your table is ready. Your wait time is approximately about 25 minutes. So, we decided to stroll in the area and at the end of about 25 minutes, I got a text message when my table was ready. I had to reply back to confirm that we were coming. This was least expected out of that place and it actually was a time-saver for a tourist like me for that place. I wasn’t a regular visitor and so by telling me the approximate wait time, it gave me the option to decide what I wanted to do for that time.
What is the product?
When I looked up the system from which I got the text message, I realized that it was a SaaS software powered by SeatOn. It is an arrival management system that helps eateries manage queue lines and also plan their service. It is integrated with the Clover POS hardware. This hardware is popularly used for billing the customer.Â
As a customer, the product supports walk-ins and reservations too. It has intelligent outreach from booking until letting you know when you are ready to enter the restaurant. It has some really intelligent analytical features like customer behavior analysis (identify loyal customers, favorite tables) and reporting capabilities.
Product learning
Value chainÂ
This app is meant to be an add-on for the Clover POS customers. The Clover product has the customer paying for the device. By adding the SeatOn app in their workflow they are able to track the customer experience from booking until billing!Â
- The SeatOn app is supposed to drive efficiencies for the user and improve customer experience. This is also available in the free offering.Â
- You can also track employee performance and the customers they served. Over time, as your customer base grows, if you don’t optimize your operations then it shows in the quality and service. You can get actionable insights if you upgrade.
- You can check the workflow of your customers from booking until billing. With this, you know your usual customers and the business they bring to your company.
Pricing strategy
From small setups to corporations, everyone wants to monetize their product/service. However, why would the customer pay if they don’t know what to expect? Also, what is a good way of spreading the word? – The answer to both is an extremely good basic offering.
Extremely good free offering
The eatery I went to had less than 10 people working. So, they cannot really afford the plans that some of the other apps have. (As of Jul 2022, some of the other waitlist apps have their basic offering priced at $40 per month!) With the SeatOn app, they can certainly handle the arrival management aspect of it. In the busy season, this is really handy because customers are pouring in at all times! The customers are satisfied with the transparency. Even if you have a waitlist for an hour, they might not come in that day but might come over the next time because they appreciate the transparency.Â
With increasing efficiencies, it is likely that their business grows. They would be likely to upgrade when their business grows. In a way, the free tier helps you grow your business and you are likely to sign up for the advanced features.
Pay-as-you-go offering
Along with all the features in the basic offering, you get 2 big features that are important as you grow. First, the ability to generate employee performance reports. You need to ensure that your employee to number of customers ratio is good so that you can ensure good quality of food and service to them. It also helps you give them feedback based on data. When the number of employees are less than 10, it is easier to analyze their performance without sophisticated tools but when the number of employees grow, it gets harder. Second, you get customer behavior analysis. As your number of customers grow, you would have advanced business strategies. For example, you would want to gift coupons for your loyal customers. You wouldn’t know how to go about it unless you have data about who your loyal customers are. That is where the customer behavior analysis would help.Â
Standard & Professional plans
You get similar features as pay-as-you-go except that it is driven by the number of waitlist customers and reservations. You also get more reporting with professional plans. The IVR phone reservation capability is available with these plans. When you have 100s of customers making reservations, this feature is a must-have.
Overall, with a rich free offering, it has set the stage for the eatery to grow and when they upgrade to the paid versions, there is less of a learning curve because you only get more features.
While it might be slow initially and you might have many customers choosing the free plan to begin with, in the long run, the customer will stick with you because they know that you have advanced offerings to support their growing business. It may seem counterintuitive at first. But once the customer adapts a product like SeatOn in their workflow, they are likely to stick with it.
What makes a product sticky?
Growing efficiency means that you have fewer steps, you get rid of repetitive work and there are fewer user errors. Your employees too are used to the application in their workflow. For example, in the situation where a customer has to wait to get in, the earlier workflow was as follows – The employee took down a customer’s name, asked them to wait for “some time” and notified them when a table freed up. The workflow now is that the employee uses the SeatOn app, gives them an estimated wait time and the app notifies them via text message when a table is ready for the new customer. When the eatery grows, and they want advanced reports for customers/employees, then the owner is likely to switch to an advanced plan instead of having to change the workflow to something else.Â
It is amazing how small pain points to begin with has opened a vast opportunity for growth in the restaurant business!