Greca Transforms Daily Briefings with SevenRooms Pre-Shift

When Greca opened in December 2018, it became The Apollo Group’s first venture outside of Sydney and the third concept to open within Brisbane’s bustling Howard Smith Wharves. In no time, the 185-seat Greek taverna was among the busiest in the waterside entertainment and dining destination.

In an industry built on relationships, recognizing and acknowledging locals, regulars and other VIPs had always been important to the restaurant’s managers. And while they were able to leverage SevenRooms’ Auto-tags to their benefit during and after service, sharing this information amongst the team in advance to empower them to enhance the dining experience for these special guests was not without its challenges. Managers needed to run multiple reports in order to access all the data they needed to convey to staff during pre-service briefings, and even then, daily notes were taken with pen and paper.

Mick Dwyer, FOH Operations Manager at Greca, with one of the restaurant’s old pre-service briefing sheets.

To address this inefficiency, Greca chose to be among the earliest adopters of SevenRooms’ Pre-Shift feature. This functionality gave the team a detailed overview before each service — including the reservation flow, guest notes and more. The manager on duty could now quickly filter reservations to view VIPs, large parties and guests celebrating birthdays or other special occasions, making it easy to identify where they might want to kick the hospitality up a notch.

Greca’s new Pre-Shift dashboard that automatically surfaces relevant information for restaurant staff saving them hours a week.

This transformed what had been a time-consuming, manual process into something more streamlined and available on-the-fly from the SevenRooms iOS app. “Trying to get more information out of the system in service is our main goal. SevenRooms makes everything very user-friendly,” says Ronnie Gorman, Operations Manager at Greca and Yoko Dining. By saving managers time and facilitating more efficient knowledge sharing across the team, SevenRooms Pre-Shift became an indispensable tool for the front and back of house alike. According to Nicholas Ingall, Operations Manager at The Apollo and Cho Cho San:

"Pre-shift is a great resource for our service leaders, waiters, bartenders and our chefs. It is having a notable effect in training our kitchen teams and their restaurant awareness. The kitchen is reviewing cover flows, service notes and goals for the front-of-house team in one view. They are becoming familiar with regular diners, their seating preferences and demands of the restaurant throughout service. Pre-Shift enables our front and back of house teams to maintain a big picture view of the restaurant while managing in detail."

"Pre-shift is a great resource for our service leaders, waiters, bartenders and our chefs. It is having a notable effect in training our kitchen teams and their restaurant awareness. The kitchen is reviewing cover flows, service notes nad goals for the front of house team in one view. They are becoming familiar with regular diners, their seating preferences and demands of the restaurant throughout service. Pre-Shift enables our front and back of house teams to maintain a big picture view of the restaurant, while managing in detail." - Nicholas Ingall, Operations Manager, The Apollo & Cho Cho San

Greca first adopted SevenRooms in early 2021. Besides facilitating easier table management and reputation management, the platform helped the restaurant save over $466K AUD through direct, commission-free bookings over the next two years. Meanwhile, automated marketing emails generated nearly $278K AUD of incremental revenue behind-the-scenes, helping Greca achieve an impressive 60x ROI over the same period of time.

Interested in learning how SevenRooms can help you make the most of your daily Pre-Shift meetings? Reach out today to schedule a demo.

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