Social Tap Decreased Wait Times From 20 Minutes to 2 Minutes and Drove Revenue by $1,500 an Hour
VENUE SPOTLIGHT
Venue type
- Elevated Sports Bar
Location
- San Diego, CA
POSTED
- May 25th, 2023
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Social Tap is an elevated sports bar located directly across the street from the San Diego Padres Stadium, Petco Park. On game days, Social Tap gets really busy, really fast. With 80+ Padres home games a year, Social Tap needed a solution on how they could serve tons of fans fast, while keeping a great customer experience.
Before Union, Social Tap was using a very traditional service model. A server would greet the guest, take orders on their notepad and punch it into their POS. At their busiest, drinks could take 20 minutes to get to a table. Margins in the restaurant business are super thin, so they didn’t just want to keep hiring staff, they needed a more efficient solution.
Social Tap General Manager, Jake Snyder, noted that over the years, they had tried a number of solutions to serve the volume of customers they were seeing without sacrificing experience, but nothing seemed to work.
Then they heard about Union. It was only 3 weeks before opening day, their busy season, when they decided to switch their entire restaurant system over to Union.
“Honestly, it was risky, but after meeting the Union team, we felt it was the right decision. We communicated our tight timeline and they promised with their intuitive technology our team could be fully up and running before opening day.”
Unlike other point of sale systems, Union is an all-inclusive bar and restaurant ordering platform built specifically for high volume hospitality.
Union provides its venue partners with an easy-to-use POS that is built to maximize speed to order, a guest-led ordering platform where guests can instantly order by scanning a QR code with their smartphone and a recommendation engine that suggests drinks based on a customer’s personalized preferences.
To ensure a smooth transition, Union team members, Jake and Tim, were on-site at Social Tap for installation and training. As promised, the POS was intuitive, making it easy for staff to get up to speed on the new system quickly and Union’s onsite technology team took care of all the hardware, making sure everything was installed correctly and efficiently. The install was finished just 4 days before opening day, and less than 3 weeks after Social Tap decided to adopt Union. On opening day, Jake and Tim were again onsite to support Social Tap’s first peak day.
“The support was incredible. As we worked out the kinks of a brand new system they were onsite to fix an offline printer, waitstaff questions, and anything else that came up. The day was a huge success.”
Social Tap has only been using Union’s technology for 3 months, but they have already seen huge changes in their revenue and staff efficiency.
Before Union, at peak times it could take up to 20 minutes for a customer to get a drink. Now, even at peak times, it takes less than 2 minutes for a customer to get a drink.
Customer’s love Union’s mobile ordering because it’s so easy and fast. No apps are required for download, all you have to do is scan a QR code and you are brought to a full food and beverage menu to order from.
On average, Social Tap is seeing 2 more drinks on every check and about $1,500 in additional revenue an hour.
Because drinks are coming out so much faster, check size and revenue per hour are up substantially. Even though this is a huge increase in capacity, they still are able to deliver high quality service because servers are spending less time taking and inputting orders. Instead, they are spending more time checking-in with guests, answering questions and seating tables. They have even been able to run at this higher volume with 1 less server per section, instead adding a drink runner and a bartender to contend with the increase in orders.
Waitstaff love that the POS is geared towards high volume bars and restaurants and offers valuable features like a simple interface, easy search functionality for the most popular drinks, and even a one-click recipe feature, for quick answers to customers’ questions. Not to mention, they are seeing bigger tips from happier customers.
"We often hear from customers that they are impressed with how smoothly our operations run and how quickly food and drinks come out, especially for such a busy bar."
As labor and food prices rise, bars and restaurants need to be willing to innovate to keep providing a great customer experience. Union is dedicated to helping bars and restaurants change for the better.
