Restaurant experience exercise

As a customer, I found that sometimes it can be a bit hard to get attentions of waiters or waitresses in a restaurant, because they are wiping the table or serving food and doesn’t look at you. Meanwhile, you cannot just call them loud or snap your finger, which may annoy people sitting at the table beside you.  Basically you have to wait until they look at you and wave to them.

Me myself had been working in two different restaurants as a waiter, I did not realize that you have to be really good at multitasking to be a good waiter before I got those two jobs. I had to take customers to their table, take the order, serve food, get bills for them, and sometimes those tasks all comes together at the same time. I really had to work my head around those tasks and sometimes I may not notice that some customers are trying to get my attention.

The experiences described above are actually subject to some internal and external factors. For instance, if there are only one or two small group of customers, it is pretty much impossible for a waiter not to notice that they need help. However, when it is peak hour during diner time, all the tables are occupied and seems everybody needs something, then it may make those experience even worse.

Another factor that may affect the experiences is the characteristic and capability of the manager. One of my managers has very bad temper and he shouts at us when we do something wrong or we do things in a way that he doesn’t like, even if everybody would think our way is better. This makes everybody is a bit stressed while working, and we were forced to follow his immediate order regardless what we are doing at the moment. This made it harder for us to fulfill the customers’ needs as much as possible.

Technologies can be introduced to those circumstances to make it easier for the waiter to identify who needs help. For example a button can be placed on each table which can be pressed by the customer when they need help. The computer of the restaurant gets the signal and automatically queues the demand when multiple customers need help. On their portable device, waiters and waitresses can see whom at what table needs help. This is very similar to the system Apple use in their retail stores.

The use of this technology may highly reduce the chance of customer waiting impatiently to be served, or waiters do not remembering who should they serve first and get stressed. The experiences of both stakeholders are enhanced.

To test this technology, I would choose a busy restaurant at a busy dinner time, first do one test without this technology and get some feedback from waiters and customers. Then implement the technology and do another test another evening, get feedback from the stakeholders to see exactly how much better or worse their experience gets.