SOFTWARE TECHNOLOGY
DIGITAL SOLUTIONS TO REAL-WORLD PROBLEMS FROM ROSTERING AND PAYROLL TO POS AND CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT, SOFTWARE SOLUTIONS ARE ADVANCING APACE TO MAKE IT EASIER AND QUICKER TO GET THE JOB DONE. CRAIG HAWTIN-BUTCHER REVEALS HOW TO MAKE THE MOST OF THE OPPORTUNITIES.
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If I was a publican, the very first thing I’d be doing is setting up my venue on RateBeer,” says Douglas Mitchell, perhaps unsurprisingly given he is their Australian business lead. “It’s really straightforward and similar in effort to what you’d do to set up a Google My Business profile.” The user-generated platform – already established nearly 20 years – is a forum for beer lovers to find, rate and review great beers from around the globe. Seemingly without much active effort, the Australian edition is already their fourth biggest market, behind the US, UK and Germany. Now owned by ABInBev, the site lists 10,000 beers from hundreds of Australian breweries and there is now a greater push to support that momentum. The value to publicans is the ability for platforms such as RateBeer and its natural competitor Untappd to drive footfall to their venue and convert digitally-savvy beer lovers into real-world, paying customers.
16 | DECEMBER 2018 AUSTRALIAN HOTELIER
FROM SEARCH TO SIT “We’re working on how to connect customers ‘from search to sit’,” says Mitchell. “This is taking the consumer from finding and rating a beer to purchasing that beer at a retail partner.” This sort of leveraging of software and technology to impact either your bottom line or ease your workflow is the holy grail that so many tech start-ups and software companies are seeking to unveil. The good news is that many of them seem to have found it. “We’re primarily a cloud-based solution that allows businesses to roster their staff, manage staff leave, complete timesheets and additional features such as managing training and RSA certifications,” says Liam Smee, Global Head of Demand Generation at Deputy. The company is apparently gaining real traction, not least because their cloud-based workforcing service is available across devices and operating systems. Deputy also integrates with over 300 other platforms and software providers, everything from POS platforms such
as Vend and Kounta to accounting programmes such as MYOB and Xero. “We sit among that ecosystem of solutions that enable a business owner managing 5-10 staff all the way up to Qantas, to get clarity and control around their workforcing,” says Smee.
CLARITY AND CONTROL “The change we’re seeing now as all of these solutions begin to plug together, the level of clarity and control it gives to people is significant,” says Smee. “We have one restaurant client who is able to pull out his phone, look at his venues, see how busy they are in sales terms in real-time, and look at how many staff they’ve got on. Then give them a call and say ‘do you need me to send someone down?’ or ‘you’re doing half the volume you normally would at 4:12pm on a Wednesday, should I send someone home?’ That level of responsiveness and control, people are really enjoying.”