Serving up a storm with TGI FRIDAYS

A man named Alan Stillman opened the first TGI Fridays restaurant in 1965 in New York. 54 years, more than 870 restaurants and 60 countries later, the casual-dining veterans knocked on VoCoVo’s door for a little help reaching low-hanging growth opportunities.

TGI Friday brought VoCoVo into the fold to deliver a little forward-thinking and innovation as part of a wider strategy aimed at tackling inefficiencies while staying fresh and relevant in a rapidly evolving market landscape brimming with fast-growing newcomers.

Initially a single-restaurant install, VoCoVo hardware now features as part of the communications infrastructure across their UK restaurants with more scheduled in line with the continued nationwide revamp.

TGI Friday was struggling with time-efficiency, unempowered teams and the overall agility of their people both front and back of house. In buzzing restaurants with ample floor space, TGIF colleagues were covering huge amounts of ground in every shift — constantly having to leave their dedicated zones and leave customers waiting to find team members for basic, but essential communication. A stroll across the restaurant to speak with a manager seems trivial at face value. But when you multiply the time spent looking for colleagues across all teams and restaurants nationwide, then add the cost of missed upsell opportunities and neglected customers who are ready to leave a review straight from their phone — the business costs of slow communication start to look more serious.

Besides reducing unnecessary ‘communication-mileage’ and freeing up TGI colleagues to look after customers in their set areas, TGI’s hosts needed help too. On welcoming parties to the restaurant, hosts needed to be able to check table availability without leaving their customers waiting at the door. A similar need arose to better empower the BOH kitchen teams with a stronger link to FOH for more fluid coordination and less chance of costly misalignment.

Instead of burdening team members with frequent trips across the floor space to communicate with colleagues, VoCoVo now carries crystal clear, full-duplex, push-to-talk voice comms across the entire restaurant—even connecting the back of house team with the colleagues on the restaurant floor via a dedicated kitchen Handset.

With a VoCoVo Controller in play, management can now create and switch between separate voice conferences. This gives them the power to push important messages and announcements to select groups, who can hear across their Headsets. Managers and individuals can now collaborate more dynamically and remotely to alert one another of up-selling opportunities to maximise average spend, and can operate seamless, stress-free workflows that keep the team responsive, agile and attentive to diners for better representation of the TGIF brand that generates repeat bookings and word-of-mouth.

“We no longer have to run around looking for free tables, the team and door-host can now communicate and coordinate wherever they are in the restaurant”

Elizabeth Scott   |   Store Manager