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With a large, communal space that combines retail, restaurant and cafe experiences, Maketto is a unique marketplace that welcomes guests all day in Washington, D.C. In late Fall 2020, as the team prepared for the winter season, they reimagined their service model based on GoTab’s contactless ordering and payment features, providing their front-of-house staff with a seamless solution to scale operations based on dine-in and takeout demand.
Maketto is a large space with indoor and outdoor seating, complete with various areas where customers can sit down to enjoy coffee, work for a few hours or meet friends for drinks and/or dinner. During the pandemic, the team set up GoTab QR codes on all tables to empower guests to order directly from their mobile phones. An all-day space, this meant making different menus available at different times, along with specials and promotions. “We really love the flexibility of programming we get with GoTab,” said Director of Sales Keem Hughley. “Menus can be updated in real-time and the platform is very intuitive for our staff to use.”
While the large space and various seating areas provide ample opportunities to explore and linger, using GoTab has allowed the team to speed up service and increase table turnover, particularly in the evenings. Dinner service now sees 3 different turns of table, and F&B sales have also increased significantly. “This past month (April 2021), we have reached the same volume levels as pre-pandemic times in 2019,” said Hughley.
With GoTab giving customers control over the ordering experience, the need for traditional servers has been fully eliminated at Maketto and all FOH staff have taken on new responsibilities and acquired new skills. Now operating with 60% less FOH staff, the team was fully (re-)trained on all components of the Maketto experience, from barista duties to bartender skills to customer service. This means that anyone on the floor can fulfill coffee orders, serve dishes to guests or even make cocktails at the bar.
By turning our staff into a team of multi-faceted, customer service experts, we’ve given them the opportunity to learn more and grow in their position at Maketto. Instead of having 10-12 FOH people on the floor at once, we now have 5 people to ensure our guests have the best experience on-site. This also means our tip pool is smaller and so our staff earns more tips than they did in the past.
The implementation of a new service model at Maketto received the full support of the GoTab team, whose dedicated customer success team worked closely with the front-of-house staff to continuously improve the cloud-based contactless ordering and payment solution, and the features used by guests and staff alike. In addition to monitoring the guest experience and tracking that everything is running smoothly through the KDS on tablets, the Maketto team used the menu function to create a section dedicated to special requests from guests. This allowed better communication with guests through GoTab and ensured customer satisfaction.
The GoTab team is always available for us and extremely responsive. We constantly challenge them to enhance the platform’s capabilities and work with them to expand features that are most helpful to us, which is truly something other platforms are not willing to do. GoTab is truly unique and fantastic to work with.