VietNamNet Bridge – Tablet PCs now not only can undertake office jobs for office workers, but can also help serve customers at café and restaurants.

At 7 pm, at Cua Vang Restaurant on Tien Giang Road of Tan Binh district in HCM City, six beautiful girls were seen introducing a new beer product which they said has just available on the Vietnamese market.

Instead of showing customers a lot of papers which contained the information about the new beer product, the girls just showed a tablet PC which helped them introduce the features of the product.

A girl just touched the screen of the tablet PC, and all the necessary information showed up, while customers could see with their eyes the lively images of the product. It is still too early to say about the efficiency of the new way of marketing, but it is clear that marketing officers do not have to talk too much, while customers prove to be interested in the new product. “A modern way of doing marketing,” a customer commented.

At two big restaurants of Hanoi – Dragon and Dynasty, servicemen now do not have to hold papers in hands all the time and take notes the requests of customers. The menus of the two restaurants have been digitalized in five languages, Vietnamese, English, Chinese, Korean and Japanese. Customers just need to read the menus on the iPad, and then choose the dishes they want, and then press “OK”. The orders placed by customers would go directly to the kitchen, bar and cashier counters.

Four years ago, at the café Coi Nguoi in Bien Hoa City of Dong Nai province, the servicemen here used O2 phone to choose dishes after taking orders from customers, and then “sat idle”. The existence of the mobile phones allowed the café owner to cut down the number of servicemen.

After that, the method of placing orders with digital devices has been not only used at Coi Nguon, but at many other café and restaurants such as Nha Vien, Seoul in Dong Nai province, Toi in HCM City.

Due to the limited financial capability, instead of using tablet PCs, the cafés have shifted to use iPod Touch instead of O2 which is now no more available on the market.

At New York Steak House in district 1 in HCM City, the menu has also been digitalized with iPad. Four iPads have been used for the work of taking orders from customers. Besides, the managers of the restaurant said the iPads have been lent to children to play games when they are together with the parents at the restaurant.

Software products ready

In order to make the operations of choosing dishes and placing orders on iPad, Dragon and Dynasty are using iMenu software product of Bach Hop – BICWeb which has the headquarter in Hanoi.

Tran Duc Hieu, a manager of Bach Hop, said that the purchase of terminal devices has cost a lot of money, but he believes that this would bring higher efficiency.

The representative of Dragon restaurant said that using iMenu allows it to save the money for printing. As the restaurant has nearly one thousand dishes, it will need a 10 cm book if printing the names of the dishes on paper. Meanwhile, if the restaurant wants to change the prices of some dishes, it will have to re-print the whole menu book, which is really a big waste of time and money.

Also according to Dragon, with the digital menu, the servicemen, who do not know foreign languages, can also serve foreign customers.

Hieu has revealed that iMenu software product has the price of 40 million dong.

Meanwhile, the café that use iPod Touch, are using eOrder software product developed by Huynh Cao Tuan, Deputy Director of the Data Center of the Lac Hong University in Dong Nai province.

Source: SGTT