Online sites make Restaurant reservation easy .

“It’s easy and you don’t have to deal with voice mail or a hostess who’s frazzled because the place is so busy,” she said.

When Stultz books a table through OpenTable, her transaction is instantly recorded in the restaurant’s reservation terminal located at the hosting station.

Information on seating availability is always in real time, because OpenTable has live Internet connections with all of its participating restaurants.

Most patrons booking online with OpenTable are also awarded points that can be redeemed for dining coupons at any participating restaurant.

Use will increase

Online reservations represent roughly 5 percent of the total weekly bookings at the Columbus Fish Market in Grandview, but Assistant General Manager Shawna Shilling expects that to grow as people become more comfortable with the technology.

“Some guests are still hesitant about putting personal information on the Internet. We have to earn their trust and assure them that we’re not going to garner anyone’s data for the purpose of selling it to another party,” Shilling said.

John Bremer, the general manager of Morton’s Steakhouse, says he is happy to replace the often unreliable paper and pen method of tracking reservations. The OpenTable system also includes table management software and a guest database. Bremer and his staff use both.

The guest management function allows restaurants to track customer preferences, view customer reservation histories at-a-glance and track special occasions such as birthdays and anniversaries. A robust guest database can then be used to conduct e-mail and direct mail marketing to increase repeat business.

http://columbus.bizjournals.com/columbus/stories/2007/02/26/focus6.html?f=et181&b=1172466000^1422489&hbx=e_vert

Restarateur Strike back at Reviewer

 One of the city’s most prominent restaurateurs took out a full-page advertisement in The New York Times on Wednesday, accusing the newspaper’s chief food critic of lacking the bona fides to do the job.

Your readers would not expect your drama critic to have no background in drama or your architecture critic to not be an architect,” Jeffrey Chodorow wrote. “For a publication that prides itself on integrity, I feel your readers should be better informed as to this VERY IMPORTANT fact, so they can give your reviews the weight, or lack thereof, they deserve.”

The ad comes on the heels of Bruni’s review of Chodorow’s newest Manhattan eatery, Kobe Club, which specializes in serving tender and fatty Kobe beef from Japan. A 10-ounce rib-eye portion of the beer-fed cattle, considered a delicacy, costs $150 on Chodorow’s menu.

Bruni didn’t think much of the place and chopped it into little pieces, essentially warning his readers to stay away. He gave it zero stars out of a possible four.

“Although Kobe Club does right by the fabled flesh for which it’s named, it presents too many insipid or insulting dishes at prices that draw blood from anyone without a trust fund or an expense account,” Bruni wrote on Feb. 7.

Another high-profile critic, Adam Platt, of New York magazine, also panned the restaurant.

“Mr. Chodorow’s restaurant seems to me less like a steakhouse than a bizarre agglomeration of restaurant fashions and trends, most of them bad,” Platt said earlier this month in a review entitled “Butchered.”

In the highly competitive world of city restaurants, such criticisms can be the financial kiss of death.

An exasperated Chodorow decided enough was enough, and he struck back with an ad the newspaper says typically costs $115,000.

“It’s expensive, but not that much,” Chodorow told The Associated Press.

The ad was addressed to Pete Wells, editor of the newspaper’s Dining section.

http://www.newsday.com/news/local/newyork/ny-bc-ny–fumingrestaurateu0221feb21,0,3472572.story?CFID=4239264&CFTOKEN=29247181

Churches Chicken – Dont do this to your customer

Call to let them know i had got some bad chicken. The maneger was rude. He told me i have served 300 people today and your family was the only ones to complain. Then he hung the phone up on me.

http://www.my3cents.com/showReview.cgi?id=19190

Mcdonalds – Listen to me please – order taking

 ordered a snack wrap. The girl entered it as a snack wrap meal. I got charged for two snack wraps, fries and a drink. All I wanted was one snack wrap but I left with two snack wraps, fries and a drink. She offered to correct it but I was in a hurry so I said forget about it. The food was great but I’ll never go to McDonalds again.. never again!

It’s amazing how inept McDonald’s workers are these days. If you value your time and don’t want to be taken advantage of then avoid McDonald’s at all cost. They make mistakes. Not good for such a big named company. Bing!

http://www.my3cents.com/showReview.cgi?id=19204

Restaurant Complaints

Just go here http://fatandhappyfoodslut.com/tag/restaurant-complaints/

Here is your Burger and would you like a perfume too

We were on vacation in Fort Lauderdale Fl on 2-14-07 and stopped at the location near the airport. I would guess 17th street. After placing our order, the girl behind the counter asked us if we would like to buy any designer purses or shirts. These were clearly counterfiet items. We kept telling her no we just came for lunch. She kept on pestering us the whole time we were waiting for the chicken to finish cooking. We came to KFC for food, not to be bothered by the cashier. My husband and I were furious. She had them sitting right on the counter. The customer before us either bought something from her or was her distributor because they had an order placed. The girl didn’t have on a name tag but the whole time she kept smacking herself on the top of her head. We came to get take out and enjoy our vacation, not to be harassed by the employee selling her fake goods.

I would like this restaurant checked into. The employee’s conduct was horrible. Reimbursment for our luch would be great. 10 pc meal and a popcorn chicken combo. Thank you, Tina

http://www.planetfeedback.com/index.php?level2=blog_viewpost&topic_id=296520

The Survey Says…

Want to know what consumers think? Put down the comment cards and poll them online instead.

Don’t trust online polls. That’s what traditional-minded researchers have been telling business owners for years. The Internet isn’t diverse enough to be a valid testing ground, they argue, so data gathered online is bound to be skewed.

If that argument was ever valid, it no longer is. Consumers of all stripes are giving feedback to businesses online. One out of every four American Internet users–about 33 million people–has rated a product, service, or person online, according to a recent study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, an initiative of the Washington, D.C.-based Pew Research Center. That number is expected to grow as consumers become accustomed to having more interactive relationships with companies, says Lee Rainie, director of Pew Internet. “We’re well past the time when this was an activity of early adopters,” he says. “This is how consumers want and expect to communicate with businesses.”

At the same time, new technology offered by companies such as SurveyMonkey, based in Portland, Oreg., and WebSurveyor, based in Herndon, Va., is making it easier for companies to conduct online polls. The polling software aggregates hundreds of responses to multiple-choice questions into easy-to-read documents, complete with graphs and charts, that can be mined for information on everything from customer satisfaction to product development.

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20051001/handson-technology.html

A Technology Convert

Call Josh Wolkon a late, but now enthusiastic, adopter of reservations technology. His 9-year-old Vesta Dipping Grill is consistently listed as the No. 1-booked Colorado restaurant at OpenTable.com. “Our clientele base is Internet savvy, I’d guess,” he said.

However, if it wasn’t for the insistence of his managers, his team would still be answering phones and entering reservations by hand.

“They had to talk me into using OpenTable. There are a lot of products out there designed to take money out of the restaurant owner’s pocket. I waited to see which online reservation service won the war,” he said.

Wolkon decided to try it for a year. “Now, I think it’s great. We have a phone message that directs customers to make reservations online.”

Wolkon admits to the error of his ways. “In retrospect, I was proven wrong and I’m man enough to admit it. Listen, everybody wants to eat at 7:30 or 8 p.m. on a Friday. Everyone would show up at once and get seated at once. It was hard to control the flow of the food and service. Now they will make reservations earlier or later and don’t have to stand around for two hours in the bar.”

In January alone, Wolkon said Vesta Dipping Grill received reservations for 479 “covers” (or diners) directly through OpenTable.com, and 1,020 through Vesta’s Web site, which routes diners to OpenTable.

“The January monthly report also tells me that 52 percent of those customers were first-time diners and that the average dinner ticket was $40 (per person),” he said.

“It really has made a difference. If you take reservations, you almost have to use it.”

That’s not to say that OpenTable has no quirks and problems.

“We’ve had situations where someone tries to make a reservation on a night when we are booked solid and the system offers the next available reservation, which may be the next day or the next week. Sometimes diners don’t look closely enough and show up on the wrong day. That happened on Valentine’s Day. It was tough.”

Diners are not charged to use OpenTable, at least not directly. Restaurants pay a monthly fee to the company, plus $1 for every reservation made through OpenTable.com and 25 cents if made through the restaurant’s Web site. For Rioja, OpenTable costs an average of $600 a month, Gruitch said.

http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/dining/article/0,2792,DRMN_24_4622495,00.html

How Retailers are using Ratings and Reviews

It has been six months since Macy’s opened its Web site to customer comments and reviews, and Peter Sachse, the chairman and chief executive of macys.com, regularly finds himself surprised by what the company is learning from its clientele. The site now gets upward of 350 reviews a day, some full of praise, others with serious concerns.Marketing companies have longed for years to have a window on how consumers use their products, in order to develop product innovations and improve marketing. Procter & Gamble, for example, follows mothers for weeks at a time to see how they use Tide detergent and Olay skin-care creams. P&G has even had women strap video cameras to their heads to see what they do moment by moment.

More Likely to Buy

Now, as more and more retailers have opened up their sites over the past year, they have been able to listen in on conversations that couldn’t even take place before. Customer feedback is opening the eyes of the industry, changing the way they market, manufacture, and merchandise. In one recent example from Macy’s, consumers complained that a metal toothbrush holder was rusting countertops. Sachse and his staff took notice — and promptly pulled the item from the site.

Customer reviews have long been part of cutting-edge sites like Amazon.com and Netflix, but the practice is spreading dramatically these days to a broader array of retailers. By the end of 2006, 43% of e-commerce sites offered customer reviews and ratings, almost double the 23% figure at the end of 2005, according to New York research firm MarketingSherpa

See Full Article http://www.toptechnews.com/story.xhtml?story_id=031000YVYZEV&page=1

O’Charley Diners Feedback

Survey Says
As O’Charley’s works to perfect a new restaurant design and operations model, the chain plans to rely heavily on customer feedback to choose a look.

At its test store in Hendersonville, Tenn., servers and managers will ask customers to take an online survey about their dining experiences. “We’ll be asking them questions geared specifically to the impression customers had about guest satisfaction,” says Geoff Kokoszka, who heads Project RevO’lution for O’Charley’s.

Customers who complete the survey will receive coupons for free appetizers or check discounts, he says.

Kokoszka adds that the company is not sure how long it will need to collect data on the changes, but the chain hopes to have finished designing the new look by the fall.

To see the full article    http://www.rimag.com/archives/2006/06a/o-charleys.asp