The right online tool makes all the difference

It’s a lesson many of us learn from our fathers, that the right tool for the job makes a huge difference. Sometimes that lesson is reinforced by a practical lesson. One summer I was clearing bush on farmland and had to cut down a small tree with a pickaxe, after the regular axe’s handle broke. That was some serious toil that I would not be keen to repeat.

One of the joys of working in the online space is the endless amount of opportunities that arise, and it is even more exciting when the opportunity looks like it will be the right tool for the job. Last year we were very excited to be chosen by Dimmi to develop Australia’s first real-time online restaurant reservation service. One of the key challenges was to create an application that was intuitive for users and that was also very easy for restaurants and partner organisations to implement into their websites.

The result is an independently hosted application that makes real-time calls to determine a restaurant’s availability and provide the user with up-to-the-second booking information. The application is robust and quite sophisticated, being able to be used with handheld devices such as iPhones and also automatically providing alternative times to a user if their preferred booking is not available. The application is designed with flexibility in mind for partner sites, coming with a custom set of controls that allows restaurants and partners to adjust the look of the application so that it fits in with their own designs.

This means that the application is now used on hundreds of sites and with multiple individual themes, all while providing a seamless and intuitive experience for users. It’s no wonder that since launching to the public late last year Dimmi has become Australia’s largest online restaurant booking network and has enabled bookings in excess of 50,000 covers in the last three months alone.

One of the more exciting statistics is that the vast majority of these bookings are being made at times that restaurants traditionally struggle to take bookings – when they’re in peak service periods or closed.

Dimmi have brought to market an online tool that helps both users and restaurants achieve their goals in a simple and straightforward manner. It’s the right tool for the job, and it’s clearly doing the job well.