Background
Baguette Bistro is a Vietnamese restaurant located in East Windsor, New Jersey. With its grand opening only two years ago, Baguette Bistro remains one of the only Vietnamese restaurants in the area, and has proudly brought Vietnamese culture to the forefront of the neighborhood. Baguette Bistro prides itself on its flexibility to accommodate a wide variety of clientele. With sit-down dining and counter service, Baguette Bistro is able to accommodate both regular diners and frontline workers who need a quick and delicious meal on the go.
Rosa Trieu is the co-owner and manager of Baguette Bistro. After working 20 years at an import-export company, Rosa wanted to pursue her passion for Vietnamese food. Rosa was inspired by her own mother’s love for cooking traditional Vietnamese meals for others back in Vietnam, where Rosa grew up. Now, Rosa has taken traditional Vietnamese food to Central New Jersey, where she hopes to grow the community’s love for her culture’s food.
Baguette Bistro’s Communication Predicament
As an up-and-coming restaurant in East Windsor, New Jersey, Rosa needed to find a way to communicate as effectively as possible with Baguette Bistro’s staff. Some employees preferred receiving messages on desktop computers, while others preferred texts.
On an average workday, Rosa would find herself bombarded with a slew of text messages from her staff, and was unable to keep such messages organized without a centralized form of communication. For announcements or schedule changes, Rosa would individually send out calendar reminders and text messages to each one of her staff, adding an extra layer of work to an already busy workday.
Rosa admitted that starting a Vietnamese restaurant took a lot more effort than meets the eye, and the lack of proper communication didn’t help things flow smoothly. She needed an application that offered easy group messaging, in one place, for all of her staff members 一 and luckily, she found Coast.
No More Messy Messaging – How Coast Resolved Baguette Bistro’s Communication and Organizational Issues
Rosa discovered Coast on the app store when she set out to find an all-in-one messaging and workspace application. Unlike standard text messaging, Rosa loved that Coast offered several different features to take her staff communication to the next level.
“Finding Coast felt too good to be true, but it wasn’t!”
For Rosa, one of Coast’s most important features is its ability to create and manage chat groups seamlessly. With the ability to create front of house (FOH) and back of house (BOH) chat groups, she is now able to keep conversations separate without having to jump between different applications constantly. The entire staff of Baguette Bistro currently communicates in a streamlined fashion with Coast, which means that Rosa no longer wastes time trying to reach specific employees through different mediums.
“All employees are lined up in one app, so I don’t have to search to find a specific person. With iPhone messages, non-business texts get scrambled together.”
Accountability is another major factor of Coast’s success with Baguette Bistro. Rosa no longer needs to pester her staff about whether they’ve read and understood an announcement or schedule. With Coast, a simple glance at her mobile screen lets her know who has and has not yet read her message. This has saved a tremendous amount of time and energy when it comes to Baguette Bistro’s staff retention and accountability.
Baguette Bistro often experiences a rotation of staff, as many of them are students attending the local university. Coast allows Rosa to continue using the same chat groups, while different staff members can be added and removed easily from messaging.
“I do not have to create a different text group when I remove a person, or when he has left group. I simply remove the person from business.”
Rosa has also found that Coast messaging allows for stronger organization between her and her staff. Coast allows for easy editing and deleting of previously-sent messages; thus, when Rosa makes an announcement that becomes null and void, she can easily delete the message on Coast, and visibility for that message immediately disappears. This has helped Rosa and her staff avoid much unnecessary confusion.
Baguette Bistro’s Astounding Outcome
After adopting Coast to enhance the everyday workflow of Baguette Bistro, both Rosa and her staff have felt a major difference in their communication as a team, and are enjoying improved efficiency in how they spend their time.
“What I love about Coast is that it’s very user friendly. When group messages are delivered, you can see right away who has viewed the message, which helps us determine whom we need to contact directly.”
Coast has slashed the time Rosa and her staff spend on communicating with one another by 50% on a weekly basis. She encourages her staff to consistently use Coast to communicate with everyone at the restaurant, cutting unnecessary time spent trying to reach specific employees at Baguette Bistro.
Coast has greatly changed the way Baguette Bistro’s staff communicates, and has changed their understanding of the value of time.
“Coast has my five stars and full support!”
