Landmark Restaurant Reinvents Customer Engagement with iPad POS3 min read
The Modern Café first opened its doors in downtown Nanaimo, on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada, in 1946. The restaurant is a popular downtown destination — known to residents as much for its international menu and Nanaimo Bar Martini as it is for the famous artwork from the Barton and Leier Gallery that adorns its walls. Over the past sixty-five years, the Modern Café has become a city landmark. Last month, it also became the first restaurant on Vancouver Island to streamline its operations with an iPad POS (point-of-sale) system.
The restaurant’s new owner, Scott Cooper, says he wants the Modern Café to be known as the place to go for “an amazing dining experience at fair prices.” Cooper has been reviewing, revamping, and reinvigorating the establishment since he took over last year. The restaurant already has its own, locally roasted, fair trade, organic coffee; boasts an extensive wine and cocktail list; offers a number of gluten-free, vegan, and allergy-free adaptations; and recently acquired Certified Angus Beef (CAB) certification on its steaks. Its head chef, Robert Vandermeer, is well-known for his culinary creativity. Now Cooper has reinvented the Modern Café’s customer engagement — with the help of an iPad POS.
Cooper is on a mission to make the entire guest experience unforgettable – something he believes includes the way the Modern Café services and communicates with customers. In order to ensure an experience that will “wow everyone,” Cooper turned to the digital power of the iPad POS.
Like all good restaurateurs, Cooper knows presentation is just as important as the food (see our previous blog post, “Open Asks, ‘What Can an iPad Food Menu do for You?’”). The iPad menus elegantly present Chef Vandermeer’s culinary artistry in tantalizing photos that enable guests at the Modern Café to sample the creations of his famed chef-craft in mouthwatering, high-resolution color, before they place their order. The iPad POS also enables servers to show guests a short video of individual dishes being prepared, to further whet their appetite and provide a more personal connection; the videos are embedded right on the iPad restaurant menus.
Rather than replacing servers, Cooper sees the iPad digital menus as a way to enhance customer service, while making his servers’ jobs easier. The iPad POS reduces waiting time for guests by enabling servers to place a customers’ orders in the kitchen queue directly from the table without having to go to a shared, stationary terminal. It also saves time for servers by enabling them to take and confirm reservations from anywhere in the restaurant. When a customer books a reservation on Modern Café’s website, it instantly appears on the server’s iPad menu. For returning customers, the server can immediately see a wealth of customer information that helps the staff tailor the dining experience to accommodate specific table preferences, tastes, favorites, allergies, etc. – information the server can use to further enhance the guest’s dining experience.
The iPad POS also provides the Modern Café with a perfect medium to improve customer communication and interaction. Customers can provide instant feedback on their experience via Twitter; those comments are immediately displayed on the servers’ iPad menus, giving servers the ability to respond on the spot, if needed. Cooper also uses Twitter to promote his restaurant — a strategy which, according to Derek Spalding of the Nanaimo Daily News, has increased Cooper’s business by 15% over the past nine months.
But that won’t stop Cooper from coming up with new ways to utilize the iPad POS to engage his customers and provide them with the ultimate, unforgettable dining experience.
Disclaimer: This is an independent report sourced from one or more news articles and or press releases; none of the company’s, entities or technologies digressed in this report are affiliated with or a client of Open.
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