The Bowgie Inn is a busy family pub, with views and beer garden overlooking Crantock Beach and the river Gannel. The ‘Bowgie’ which is Cornish for ‘cowshed’ is one of Cornwall’s most well-known and loved pubs. Andy Pickles has owned the pub for over 45 years and you can still see some of the original features of the old farm building.
The pub receives in excess of 75,000 covers a year and serves an extensive food and drinks menu. Our Authorised ICRTouch Silver Partner, Cornish EPOS & IT Services, has seen the pub through a complete digital transformation over the past few years.
The Bowgie Inn has been a long-standing customer of Cornish EPOS & IT Services Ltd since it was founded in 2007. In 2018 The Bowgie Inn moved to using ICRTouch’s TouchPoint software. With an existing TouchPoint and TouchOfficeWeb solution in place at the pub, Cornish EPOS & IT Services was tasked with providing a solution which was safe for both customers and staff alike when the pub reopened following the first Covid-19 lockdown.
The core aim of the pub team was to ensure they were able to continue trading as safely as possible, whilst meeting all Government implemented guidelines. A secondary requirement emerged to ensure the pub was able to meet increased levels of demand whilst operating with reduced staff availability due to the hospitality staffing crisis.
As an overarching request, The Bowgie Inn team wanted to ensure that all customers were able to place their own orders, without the need for staff intervention.
In the periods between lockdowns in 2020, it was decided that the best way to ensure the protection of its staff and customers, The Bowgie Inn would move exclusively to online ordering via the ByTable app.
“The challenges we faced with Covid safety meant we decided not to revert to bar service when the restrictions were finally lifted.” – Sally Gray, The Bowgie Inn Director
This allowed the pub to safely receive customers’ orders from their own devices and deliver food and drinks to satellite tables placed between tables in the restaurant. They have since continued to only accept orders via the App, opting not to return to bar service. This has freed up staff to allow for a more efficient service, fewer errors as orders are sent directly from the customer to the kitchen and bar.
The implementation of ByTable has since been complemented by SelfService kiosks to make the solution more accessible to customers without a smart device, or who need to use a physical payment method. We worked closely with the pub and our kiosk manufacturer to test a prototype unit and develop it to our specifications, with feedback from staff and customers at The Bowgie Inn, installing it as soon as integrated payments were available. With hardware development completed, this summer we added four wall-mounted 27” touchscreen kiosks running SelfService to complement the existing ByTable ordering.
The pub also has rear till displays with adverts, which stand central on the large open bar and ordering is now exclusively completed by either ByTable or SelfService. The install in full combines the following features and equipment:
4 x Aures Yuno with full colour rear displays & HTMLCustomerDisplay (Since the pub no longer processes orders through the tills, only one now runs TouchPoint and the others run TouchKitchen, Commander, and other business tasks).4 x 27” Touch screen kiosks running SelfServiceTouchKitchenByTableIntegrated PaymentsTouchMenu
The Bowgie Inn team now benefits hugely from a fully integrated ecosystem of ICRTouch products which not only speed up service and improve efficiency, but also provide the pub’s customers with an improved experience.
The pub faced a few challenges after lockdowns, all of which have been overcome by the intelligent installation of ICRTouch software from Cornish EPOS & IT Services:
People began to request contactless payment more often.Seeing a larger cross section of people coming back to pubs, including those less tech-savvy.Customers became unstuck if they’d forgotten their phone, had a flat battery or didn’t have their glasses.Some people even don’t have a phone at all, there was an iPad with ByTable on it for this kind of emergency, but it was becoming more common.
The Bowgie Inn was keen to provide an alternative method of ordering that eliminated all of these issues.
“SelfService kiosks were the answer to all of these hurdles. The screens are simply a giant version of the online menu, so are really simple to use, allowing our guests to browse our full bar and even discover Cornish Gins and Spirits which they would not necessarily discover when queuing at the bar. We think that this style of ordering is the future. We understand that some people find change difficult, but we have had a big change at The Bowgie with our major refurbishment. The pandemic caused a big shake up to the way that we can operate and lessons should be learnt from such a world changing event. Technology is the future and we have really enjoyed putting technology at the forefront of our business.”
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