Founded in 2017 by two friends, Jamie O’Mara and Howard Kaye, The Bok Shop is a free range fried chicken and vegan fried chicken joint. Heavily inspired by the street fried chicken culture in London and drawing on influences from Asia and Southern United States, The Bok Shop offers a balance of nostalgic and contemporary street style food.
Back in 2017, the Bok Shop had one location in Brighton and pretty much managed everything manually. The focus was largely on serving customers who were dining-in, followed by a tiny portion who chose takeout. In 2020, when the pandemic arrived is when food delivery started really taking off for the brand and they had to think about optimising their operations.
With the shift towards delivery, the existing system the brand had was not ideal as physical tickets from each delivery platform started adding up, leading to confusion on which order items had to be prepared. Inefficiencies started creeping up and there was a bit of chaos in the backend.
“We realised we probably could not do it with the existing system we had. Printing tickets, losing tickets, trying to work out which order they came in. There were times where all these orders came in at the same time, and you ended up just making whatever was easier first. This was very disruptive to the workflow.” added Alan Wong, Systems Manager at Bok Shop.
Having spent over 20 years in the restaurant industry, Alan noticed that restaurateurs were definitely relying on takeaway more and that using the POS manually to enter orders from food aggregators was not the ideal workflow anymore.
While looking for a new Point Of Sale, The Bok Shop settled on Jinoby who provided some of the key functionalities the brand needed. When it come to delivery integrations, The Bok Shop was looking for a partner who could provide personalised support to deal with any issues at hand for the brand.
UrbanPiper provided a solution that enabled the Bok Shop to say goodbye to manually punching in orders in their till. Additionally, they were able to manage orders from Deliveroo, Just Eat, and Uber Eats on a single dashboard. Once all the orders started flowing into a centralised dashboard, operations became much more streamlined for the brand. This enabled the back-of-house team to work in a much more efficient manner allowing the brand to reduce both preparation time and cancellations, and most importantly, service more orders with lesser resource investment.
In addition to the customised sales experience, the onboarding provided by UrbanPiper was extremely smooth, and the support was robust. While The Bok Shop was worried about a slight disruption to their systems, the hands-on, timely support provided by the UrbanPiper Onboarding and Technical Account Management teams ensured that the representatives of Bok Shop felt that their brand was in the right hands.
In essence, UrbanPiper helped both the back-of-house and front-of-house teams at the Bok Shop make operations more organised, enabling the brand to focus on scaling their business.
UrbanPiper helps in making your own teams happier. Your front of house team doesn’t have to manually enter orders in the till anymore, and instead focus on customer service. With the automations in place, the back of house teams, like the chefs, can now work in a more streamlined and efficient manner. Additionally, there wasn’t any disruption while making the shift to UrbanPiper, and the communication and support has been great throughout.
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