5pm.co.uk
1 March 2006
Category: Food & Drink
Location: South West England
Size: SME
Application: Buy & Sell Online, Communications
For restaurateurs that prefer to have a dedicated website, 5pm also offers a micro-website building and management service that gives the restaurants secure access to, and control over, their online information, although 5pm can also access and update their sites if necessary. Through links with other web based service providers such as AOL and lastminute.com, along with mobile phone companies (5pm has recently built WAP and PDA-friendly versions of its site) and tourist boards, 5pm's web portal also gives both potential customers and restaurateurs access via links to its national marketing network. For customers that don't have access to a PC, there's also an ISDN phone service that advises callers of tables available and special promotions in their area, often in conjunction with local press promotions. 5pm needs constant, fast access to its hosted servers so it can make sure that each restaurant's details are up to date, says Ronnie Somerville. Broadband is the obvious solution for us. With calls coming in from telephone bookers as well as online bookings, we need instantaneous access to our site so that we keep it up to date. This is particularly important when we are involved in a promotion." 5pm uses a 512Kbps ADSL service from BT Openworld that costs £350 per quarter. Even though those restaurateurs with microsites can update and manage information themselves, "it's probably not what they want to do at 7.30 on a Friday night," says Ronnie. It's the always-on nature of broadband that appeals to Ronnie, and the speed of response, as well as fast data transmission speeds. Designing and building the microsites means that an awful of data has to be unloaded to the server. "The last thing you need is long waits, and with ADSL there are no waits. At the moment capacity is adequate, but we'll almost certainly have to upgrade later this year to a 1Mbps service at least." The present and future direction of the business is based around affordable broadband services. "The development of the microsite product and our involvement with newspaper promotions was predicated on the fact that we would have a fast ADSL connection. We were just waiting for it to become available. We would have taken broadband before had we been able to." One unforeseen, but very welcome, benefit for Ronnie and his team has been a big reduction in work stress levels. "Having a speedy connection reduces stress as there's no dial-up and no waiting." 5pm has a network of eight Macs sharing the ADSL connection, and has had no trouble with the set up. "It worked straight out of the box. I just don't understand why more businesses don't use it. For us, it's one of the most cost-effective business tools around.
