Ober Eats uses digital signage to engage with customers & employees

Derry: Welcome to another SmartSign2Go customer story session. Today we’re going to hear from Tim at Ober Easy Diner out in New Hampshire on how he’s made his customers and employees feel more comfortable through using digital signage. He’s got three screens each connected to one of our Pro Players. Let’s see what he has to say.

Tim: My name is Tim Ober,  my wife Susan and myself, we both own a small diner in Hampstead New Hampshire, we’ve owned it now for almost 7 years. It’s a dream that we’ve always wanted to own, and it’s kind of interesting. We both worked in restaurants and hospitality a good chunk of our younger days, like 13 until going to college. We ended up acquiring it in 2019, the year before Covid, and that was a great way to get experience in the industry from an owning perspective.  So as quickly as we opened it we were shut down. We we love this industry, it’s hard as hell to work in this industry, to run a business and is very tough.

But really for us it was more, it was different. You know myself being an engineer during the day and my wife is running the restaurant full-time during the day and weekends. I’m there on weekends, but it was more about the people.  It’s been an incredible experience because I saw how it worked when I was younger. Things were very different, you work very hard in this, you know within this business, but we wanted to treat people differently. We wanted to work with the community but more importantly have the team work as a family together and run it differently. We have as I said, working with engineers it’s a whole different world of experience. They don’t see what it’s like to have to live where you’ve got a different set of teams working that have different life stories, and that’s what it’s about for us. Helping the team, not just within the business, but as in personal lives. 

So that’s where we’re at both, myself and Susan, have been working in the technology space for a long time and when we acquired the restaurant, it was weird, the owner said “Oh this is how we put our specials up”. They had a whiteboard and they wrote down the specials and you know they had someone doing their website, and you’d have to call them up and they’d post it. It was like we’re not going to run a business like this, we can’t do this and the first thing, one of the first things we wanted to do was get digital displays out there.  Being able to do our signage the way that we wanted to. We looked all around for it and we did come across you guys, and a bunch of your competitors, but we liked what you offered. Number one it was a lot cheaper, but it still offered a lot of the features that we wanted compared to the others. And I will say right now out in the front, personally, Derry you have been an incredible help for us. Anytime I’ve had an issue you’ve always responded, your team has always responded very quickly so we really appreciate that & wanted to make sure I said that.  

But really from our perspective it was more about a number of things. Getting specials out within the restaurant, but we have four screens in total. Three out on the floor, but what we also wanted to do with this fourth one was put it in the back where our team is all the time.  Everyone from the back of the house to the front of the house. It isn’t just there to post a schedule or whatever, it’s really about getting a different message out there to our team from just telling them that we care about them, kind of highlighting individuals.  Like we had a bunch of high school kids, because we have high school kids working on the weekend, seeing that they are involved in all these different activities and showing them we’ve gone to a number of these activities taking pictures. We put them up there and highlight the individuals, so we use it for a combination of things like that. Getting messages out, and stories about individuals that work with us, to pictures of different events for the back. But the front of the house is all around messaging our specials, any other stuff around that.  

Then another use of it is we get a lot of folks that want to visit our website. We actually end up running what we put on some of our displays as content up on our website.  So that they can actually see it from their favorite servers’ pictures of them,  if they’re on today, different specials or different messages that we want to stream. There wasn’t really any surprise. You know to us it was just the ease of using it.  I don’t know if maybe it’s from my technical background,  but I did find it easy, so that was to us, that was the most important thing.  We’re used to building, for example,  we would build our own website using things like Wix and all the tools, so it was really easy once you understood how to do that. 

To come over and do this with your guys stuff, though I say we’re in the technology space I don’t think you need to be in technology or someone in that,  it’s fairly easy if you have any creativity and you give all the tools to be able to build a lot of interesting, ways to get your story or your specials out.  You integrate with a bunch,  that was the other thing we did like, you for the price, when you compare it to others your integration is very large, which we like quite a bit.  That was part of our decision.  So ease of use for us was really nice and then the integrations of different areas.  Like for example,  you don’t have enough time in the day with a business, as you know running your business and especially in the restaurant industry, but when we’re getting our specials up, I can’t sit there and have to modify a digital screen. I don’t care how easy it is from you guys or anyone else, but simple features like Dropbox where I can plunk in our specials of the day for lunch, for soups, for drinks, for breakfast, and then I can build all my display content around it.  I don’t have to change anything but that file, and that’s been great. We use that all over the place for different things as well.  So to me just simple features like that have made our lives easier and that’s the most important thing. The pleasant surprise of it, because we just don’t have time otherwise. So without that we would have had a lot of work.

It’s about building our family and wanting to give an offer, a place for folks to have and enjoy a job, get paid well and feel appreciated in this industry.  It can be hard. One of the things that I rely heavily on is, as I said,  we promote all the individuals that work there in different ways, stories or whatever and I’m a big user of AI right now. So a lot of my content I’ll use things like Gemini or Perplexity, and a number of them to help generate my content, even about our individuals.  Look, you have to fill it with the information, but it helps pretty it up, as well as images.  It’s not just about building out that personal story, we use it for helping to smooth out other parts of the business.  I have some content more generated to help and excite our customers. 

I wanted to jump on this with you just to show the appreciation that we have.  A lot of partners, a lot of vendors that we work with, and you deal with all sorts of different people who could care less in some cases, who care greatly in others. I know you guys, in particular yourself Derry, I would promote you guys wherever.  Just the support you gave us and doing things like this is just as important, so we appreciate it. We appreciate everything you’ve done for us and to keep our business going with the signage.

So thank you very much.