Why Catering by Michaels Trusts Social Tables with Sensitive Customer Data

From intimate dinners to massive festivals with thousands of attendees, Catering by Michaels spans the gamut as the premier full-service event caterer in the greater Chicago area. With clients like Lollapalooza and the NFL Draft on their roster, the team at Catering by Michaels is trusted with highly sensitive customer information.

That information became a chief concern for Director of Operations, Jeff Ware, when he set out in search of event tech to help his team operate more efficiently. Having evaluated both free and paid tools, Jeff needed a solution to simplify room-set design and manage seating, but also have the assurance that their customers’ data was safe and secure.

“The problem with free tools is that I have no control over my data. Other programs have similar features to Social Tables, but if the software is free, I don’t know what's going to happen to my client’s information. Companies that rely on an advertising model can take our mission-critical data and sell it to the highest bidder."

I don’t want that to happen to our clients,” says Ware. “Social Tables contains some of our customer data, but I have peace of mind knowing that an advertiser won’t come in and jeopardize the client relationships we’ve maintained for years.”

Today, the Catering by Michaels team is taking advantage of Social Tables’ modern interface, which the staff can sit down and pick up very quickly. “We don’t have to spend weeks training new staff like we did with our legacy software. Communicating changes takes significantly less time since all staff have real time access to revisions, and distributing paperwork has nearly been eliminated from our workflows.”