Follow along to learn the success story of a local restaurant in Nigeria. If delicious meals are what you want, Commint Buka is the right place for you with its array of well tasty local cuisines.

Commint Buka offers it all: a serene and welcoming environment, great service, and tasty meals. To learn how it all started, we invite you to read the following interview with the IT of the business. 

Please briefly describe your business.

 We are a restaurant located in Nigeria. The restaurant is called Commint Buka. Buka in our native language means a place where you can eat. We started some years ago. I developed a Windows application for the company, which was used in day-to-day transactions. While trying to improve this application to its best version, I did a test run on the Loyverse application and we decided to use Loyverse instead since it fulfills our needs. 

I have been friends with the owner of the business for 19 years. We were trading. Nigeria is a peculiar country, the government policy can be very funny sometimes. When we understood that the government policy is not favoring us in making money, we thought, what else are we good at, and what other business can we dive into? One of us mentioned that one thing that we love to do is cook because we had one cook that cooked for all of us in the company and a dedicated kitchen where were prepared specific dishes for each of the staff members. So we thought, why not open a restaurant? We gave it a shot, and today we are not regretting our actions. 

What challenges did you face during your journey as a business owner?

It can be really stressful, especially the government policy. But we are handling it. Our priority is customer satisfaction. We wanted something that would help us turn time around  and handle the customers. We also manage customers phoning in and placing their orders. We tested your system on how we could adapt it so that it can work with customers placing orders via phone. We were able to manage this, and we see that we can use your app. 

What is your philosophy in business?

Our philosophy is “Customer satisfaction is the most important thing.” If a customer comes and says, “I didn’t like the food that you served us yesterday”, we don’t ask questions. We send them a new order. We apologize for it whether the customer is right or wrong. First and foremost, we send a new order because that keeps the customer. When we would do that, we would take the batch of food that we have prepared, if we still have it, and test it in-house, or we call other customers for feedback. 

Sometimes we found that the customer was wrong. For example, the customer was ill, and the taste buds had changed. We have been able to communicate with some customers and share with them that we have returned the food, but please do some checks. Some of the customers thanked us for this feedback because they got tested and found that they were growing in temperature and falling ill. This is us, customer relationships are our priority. 

So, every app or system that we decide to use must be able to take us to the next level. We have an in-house app already, a local cash register that famous Fastfood chains use but we wanted to go way beyond like managing the staff and taking the customer order using a mobile. We want to have 10-15 counter staff taking orders from the customers. To put it shortly, we are aiming to use systems that would improve our servering and turn around time. That’s why we have been very slow to adapt the Loyverse app, but we have found it to be very good. 

Do you offer other cuisines in addition to the Nigerian one?

The Buka name comes from local cuisine, which means local food. We don’t do continentals foods. 

Is the chef in the restaurant the same chef that cooked for your company staff before opening the restaurant?

Now we have over twenty chefs and we have a recipe so there is always consistency. 

How did you first learn about Loyverse? 

I am an IT person and used Loyverse for my own personal business. I render my services to other people. I used the Loyverse in another business before with one of my clients, and when the Commint Buka owner said he was searching for a point-of-sale application, I remembered that I had to use your application before and we started testing Loyverse in the new restaurant. 

What features of Loyverse do you think have been most useful in your business so far?

Basically, Nigerian love reports and Loyverse offer very useful reports that give insight into the business and most importantly these reports are exportable offering the possibility to elaborate them further. In addition to this, the option to create accounts for employees seamselessly is extremely important for us since there are some unskilled employees who can be unloyal. The skilled ones are the most stable but the unskilled ones are not. Having this in mind we want to create something that is not tied to the employees but we have ownership of it. We want to be able to create an employee profile without having to go through the email of an employee.

Loyverse interface is very easy and intuitive to use. It did not take me more than 10 minutes to train my employees on how to use the application. 

We do also do delivery and Loyverse offers the possibility to print the customer’s address in the receipt which is a very useful to us. We have also used workarounds in case a customer does not want to receive the order in the address he has registered in the system. I have created an item called “Delivery location” with 0 price. When I prepare the ticket, I add this item and add as a comment to it the address of the customer. The possibility to assign a dining option to each ticket is also a very convenient feature that we use. 

What makes the Commint Buka stand out from other restaurants?

Taste and service. 

What advice would you give to young entrepreneurs?

Dedication and service. There are three Cs:

1- Content - something to deliver, something good that would make the customer want to come back

2- Container - how you present what you have to offer

3- Consistency - doing in the same way over and over again 

There is one addition: your market should be your macro set. Once you have a market, the sky is the only limit, you have volume.