Here is a little business idea I had today for restaurant owners.

NOTE: If anyone is already doing this let me know. I’d love to use their service.

I’ll start by setting up the story. My wife wanted to make a reservation at Harbour Sixty, in Toronto, tonight. We’ve been there many times and spent a lot of money there. I think it’s safe to say we are good to very good clients. We both hate the process of finding a phone number, calling, waiting and booking a reservation. Thank God for OpenTable. We use it for all our bookings and unless we REALLY want to eat somewhere we rely on OpenTable to find out if there is availability.

So what is my idea? If the restaurants are going to allow OpenTable to book a reservation those same restaurants should automatically have a profile of me on their local systems. They should know how frequently I visit, how much I spend, favorite drinks, favorite meals etc. In tonight’s example if Harbour Sixty had had this in place their system would have shown an opening to OpenTable (maybe the times where they could best squeeze us in) and not lost our business.There is much more you could do with this idea. If you have this system you can make sure your frequent customers don’t have to rely on a waiter recognizing them for the experience to be memorable. You would already know their favorite waiters and make sure they are assigned to them. If their is something special happening you make sure they are in on it. For example we’ve eaten at Nobu Atlantis more than 100 times. The last time we were there Chef Nobu Matsuhisa was in town and we happened to meet him. We should have been guaranteed to meet him and introduced as very loyal and frequent clients. 

The world has changed so much in the past year. As a business owner there is so much information regarding your customers that is now available.  As an example with Facebook connect you can pull pretty much all the relevant information you could possibly have ever wanted. The companies using the tools available and providing a better customer experience will be able to dig deeper (and more frequently) into those customers’ pockets.

It isn’t safe for any business (including restaurants) to continue to run the way they’ve traditionally been run. It’s a new world embrace it and, in the words of Gary Vaynerchuk, CRUSH IT!!!

If you implement this let me know. I’d love to use this service!

Sean Shapcott