A team of young entrepreneurs thinks they've come up with a better way to let restaurant diners know when their table is ready.
WaitMaster is a web application that lets restaurant hosts digitize their wait lists and send text messages to parties when it's time to have a seat.
The program eliminates the hassle and expense of making customers carry around clunky buzzers, which have limited range and are often lost or stolen.
Prodality, the new name for an aspiring startup agency founded by three recent University of Minnesota graduates, plans to charge restaurants $50 a month for the service, which runs off a netbook at the host stand.
Buffalo Wild Wings started a test of the system in its Apple Valley restaurant a few weeks ago, and set it up two weeks ago at its Roseville location. If the restaurants are full, customers can give their name, phone number, and e-mail address and then roam Bear Valley Road or Har Mar Mall until they get a text alert telling them to come on back.
"You get a text message on your phone saying your table is ready, which makes sense for consumers because they want to walk around. They want to have the flexibility, and the pagers don't really travel that far. Usually it's 100 feet, if that," says
Parag Shah, one of Prodality's co-founders.
Restaurants can use the system to keep track of customer visits, and the team plans to add features in the future that will turn WaitMaster into a more robust loyalty tool. Customers who frequently add their names to wait lists, for example, could be awarded discounts, as with Foursquare check-ins.
Prodality teamed up with the local creator of
TeeMaster, an online golf reservation system, to create the original wait list application, which it then adapted for restaurants. It's working on another restaurant-related app, too.
LunchBox lets users place take-out orders with participating eateries using their computer or smart phone.
Source: Parag Shah, Prodality
Writer:
Dan Haugen