Canadian based Service Inspired Restaurants (SIR Corp) is a Canadian company founded in 1992. Today it has over 5,500 team members and seven restaurant brands across 55 locations in Canada. Its food and beverage revenue currently stands at $300 million.
In this video, Stephen Seymour, VP of Technology and Melissa Grinko, Projects & Operations Manager for Service Inspired Restaurants (SIR Corp), discuss why removing friction is its mantra, and how the business has been able to achieve this with the use of cutting-edge table management technology, while dramatically saving on labour costs and increasing revenue and profits.
It wasn’t until the business decided to implement a loyalty programme across its brands that it became clear its current table management solution could not deliver an enterprise loyalty programme to the scale it required. “We started looking around and QSR Automations’ ConnectSmart® Host system was pointed towards enterprise and included tons of APIs and automations that quite frankly, didn’t exist in our current platform. We got integrations with our POS systems, OpenTable, plus Google Reservations and we gained a tremendous amount of capability. It was kind of a no-brainer decision around moving to QSR,” explains Stephen Seymour, VP of Technology at SIR Corp.
SIR Corp’s Edna + Vita brand situated in the financial district of Toronto, experiences very heavy footfall during the lunchtime service. “There are days here at lunch where we’re doing over 300 covers. Our guests know they can come to the restaurant, expect their reservation is waiting for them and be in and out of our doors in under an hour - this is critical to them,” explains Melissa Grinko, Projects & Operations Manager at SIR Corp.
Removing friction is a mantra SIR Corp lives by. The business wanted to understand how guests are negatively affected in a restaurant visit and what gets in the way of a perfect restaurant visit. “We started thinking about it, and it all comes down to waiting. Waiting for refills for drinks, waiting for your check and paying. By automating or giving guests the capability to do all these things - making reservations in our app, via web, via phone, they can now take advantage of these capabilities,” explains Seymour. Grinko continues: “ConnectSmart® Host has allowed guests to take their experience into their own hands and transform it into a further positive experience and so those little pain points we experience with friction no longer exist.
“We use ConnectSmart® Host in managing table efficiency and how we seat guests appropriately at the right size table for the right size parties. ConnectSmart® Host shows us what tables we have available, what party sizes are coming into the restaurant, so that we can move parties as they join the waitlist. It allows the technology to communicate with the host and the guest at the same time. We can send them a text message and they can reply directly through ConnectSmart® Host. It is critical for us to take full advantage of that efficiency, because when we can maximise business flow, we’re maximising the guest experience,” concludes Grinko.
Seymour picks up: “Without that seating efficiency you are in a compromised position around building the most profitable business model. Seating your guests efficiently means more money on the bottom line. Our increase in sales based on seating efficiency with ConnectSmart Host® is around 2%.”
So, how does SIR Corp utilise the ConnectSmart® Host technology to really get to know their guests? “We can turn on features that say, your birthday is April 15 - we can actually track that information. We like to capture things like, what’s your favourite drink and do you have a favourite table,” explains Grinko.
Typically, labour accounts for 25-40% of a restaurant’s revenue. For many restaurants, even a 1–2% improvement in labour efficiency can significantly boost net profit margins, which often sit below 10%. “I would say ConnectSmart® Host has allowed us to save upwards of 4-5 hours a day. Between 1-2 hours at lunch and 2-3 hours at dinner,” confirms Grinko.
In conclusion, is there an opportunity to do greater things with QSR Automations? “Yes, 100%. We are going to be asking for things that are not the norm. They have an incredibly robust support programme, just for technical support, never mind partner integrations. It’s been a great experience for us. I feel we can move forward with QSR with confidence into the future,” concludes Seymour.
To find out more about the QSR Automations ConnectSmart® Host platform and how the technology can help to play a key role across your front-of-house visit ConnectSmart® Host or call (UK) 020 3870 4571 (US) 855 980-7328
