Some restaurants are not aware of what happens when one of their customers makes a booking on their website so we thought we would go through the process so that everyone understands the process and the implications for your restaurant.
A few weeks ago a colleague made a booking at a restaurant in Chapel Street for lunch. They were using Dimmi, and used their widget to make the booking. On arriving at the Restaurant, they weren’t able to seat us, so we hope they weren’t charged for the booking of 4.
What happened next is the most interesting part of the process and highlights the concerns that restaurants should have. Our colleague started to get emails from Dimmi offering 50% off food for restaurants in the area.
The email below had a 50% off food offer for a restaurant at lunch just 5 kilometres away.
This is the scary part of sharing your customer’s contact information with Dimmi.
They booked for lunch and received an offer for 50% off the food for lunch at a restaurant just 5 kilometres away.
Dimmi knows when and where your customers like to eat and market to that. We believe that Dimmi’s offering is a way for diners to find restaurants to eat at and they use restaurants for service fulfilment. Dimmi actually charge restaurants to give away their contact details. In general $1 per seat booked through the restaurants website and $3 from their network. Restaurants should be happy to get a booking through the Dimmi network, because it may be a new customer, but paying to share a customer’s contact details seems very counterintuitive.
These offers are especially destructive for customer loyalty. In this case, a full fee paying customer is offered a 50% off coupon to dine at a competitor around 5 kilometres away. This makes it incredibly hard to build customer loyalty and why we recommend using Book A Table to take your online bookings.
We built Book A Table to help restaurants save time by taking bookings online, to build their own database with a list of customers and to save money. This is why we offer it for free for our website customers and just $49.95 per month for everyone else. We never share your customer’s details with anyone. We believe that your customers details are one of your businesses most important assets and as such should never be shared. Book A Table enables restaurants to cut out the middle man, save money and stop sharing their customers details.