It was my mother-in-law’s birthday recently and we decided on a family meal at a spicy chicken restaurant in Edinburgh. Now we all love Nandos, me especially, and I am quite used to the ordering process. But you have to understand what is in my head by this time. After my experience in London I had begun to research the feasibility of a Smartphone App for ordering food and drinks from your table. I was now convinced that it was entirely possible. What this meant for me was what would normally be a great experience in Nandos turned into quite a frustrating evening.
I began to realise how socially disruptive these ordering point systems are. We all just got settled, kids were having fun with papa, and everyone else was picking what they wanted. Because there were so many of us we had to write down our order. Papa then had pull himself away from the adoring grand children and make his way to the counter to place the order. Despite writing it down he made two trips back to table, mainly to decipher handwriting.
We went on to have several other interruptions as we ordered more stuff and resolved some ordering mistakes. At each time Papa had to disengage from the banter and head back up to the ordering point. I then reflected on what I was doing with the QikServe™ business and I really wish I had access to app on the night. At the time we were writing our order down on a piece of paper we should have been directly entering it on a QikServe App and when we needed more we could have just gone back to the QikServe™ App. How much easier would it have been? How much less disruption would we have had? It would have been like having a waiter in my pocket. In actual fact on the day, with 4 smartphones round our table, we would have had four waiters in pockets.
Roll on QikServe™ and let’s hope Nandos and others go for it!
