7 Steps to Ensure Great Customer Service at Your Restaurant

As the owner of a hospitality business, you know that customer service is critical to your success.

With new businesses popping up on every corner, customers have more options than ever about where to dine or what coffee house to frequent. Unfortunately, this means that one bad experience can permanently alter a guest’s perception of your restaurant.

Thankfully, new trends and technology are making it easy to offer great customer service to every guest. Here are seven steps you can use to take advantage of these trends and enhance your customer’s experience:

Step 1: Hire Great Staff
One of the biggest challenges restaurant owners face is finding and retaining the right staff. Ultimately, the quality of your customer service directly reflects the quality of your team. Unfortunately, finding a good team is easier said than done.

When it comes to hiring, finding great talent starts at the top. Efficient managers will have a strong work ethic and be able to manage stressful circumstances. Apart from the responsibilities of day-to-day operations, managers will be required to support staff during unpredictable customer interactions. Providing excellent customer service for things like last minute group reservations and unhappy customers will set your restaurant a part.

Great managers will also help attract top staff. Front-of-house staff members will have the most interaction with customers so each employee needs to be carefully interviewed and trained. 

Many restaurant owners are using incentive programs to encourage their current employees to help recruit high-quality candidates to hire. While these programs can be effective, it can be difficult to hire on referrals alone. Traditional hiring practices such as online postings will likely bring in more applications but often requires more screening.

Although experienced new hires are ideal, unexperienced applicants can often surprise you. Someone with a positive attitude and strong work ethic may catch on quickly and provide customers with excellent service. With the right skills and training, these inexperienced staffers may become your top employees in no time.

Step 2: Provide Proper Training
Proper training is the key to successfully onboarding any new hire, regardless of his or her skill level. An effective training program will provide a strong foundation for customer service and reflect your businesses unique culture.

“Your staff needs to be attentive to customer demands while displaying the personality of your establishment,” said Shaun Fowler in a recent article on Chron.com.

“The restaurant business is challenged with the trade-offs of quality and speed of service.”

Traditional training methods, such as shadowing and mentoring are an effective way for new hires to learn about your business. These methods will provide new employees with a way to experience senior staff’s customer interactions and branded approach to service.

Your guests will be more likely to receive great customer service if you establish expectations with new employees right away,

Step 3: Incentivize Loyalty
Recent data published by Fast Casual showed that 27% of first time guests returned at least once if they were informed about a hospitality business’ loyalty program.

These loyalty programs incentive guests to return through points programs, tiered incentives, or gamification experiences. New technology makes it easier than ever to implement programs that may have been difficult to create in the past.

Points systems, such as Belly, offer rewards to customers who frequently visit your business. Tiered systems, famously used by Starbucks, reward customers with different incentives based on how often they make a purchase.

Gamification programs, such as the McDonald’s annual Monopoly challenge, provides customers with a reason to continuously engage with restaurants by applying game mechanics to their hospitality experience. In fact, this annual promotion increased McDonald’s sales by 5% in Q3 2013 and attracted new customers worldwide.

Some POS providers are simplifying the process by letting you create a loyalty program within your POS system.

Revel Loyalty, Maitre’D, and WizBang Technology’s Onetap solutions are just a few of the POS providers that are allowing customers to create loyalty programs with their current technology. These companies offer easy-to-customise technology so you don’t have integrate yet another technology solution into your operation.

Step 4: Automate Your Restaurant Customer Service with Technology
Today’s tech-savvy consumers have more choices than ever when it comes to eating out. Now that many consumers are screening menus online before visiting in person, an online presence is required for exceptional customer experience.

Hospitality and Restaurant Checklist: What Technology You Need in 2017

Online and mobile ordering is becoming increasingly popular for hospitality businesses and provides customers with the option to place a delivery or takeaway order on-demand. You can reduce customer wait time and eliminate the potential errors by allowing your customers the option to order online,

Shake Shack recently made headlines with an online ordering app that allows customers to place their order and select a pickup time, putting the entire experience back in the hands of their customers.

Apart from online ordering, restaurant owners are using technology such as table side tablets, digital menus and games while-u-wait to provide a unique customer service experience.

Try Online & Mobile Ordering at Your Restaurant with a 30-Day Trial

Step 5: Delivery
In a recent study, 36% of millennials admitted to ordering delivery at least once per week. As a restaurant owner, this means you need to provide great customer service for both customers dining in and those who order out.

Although some restaurants manage delivery internally, others are outsourcing delivery to third parties. Companies such as BringIt and OrderLord specialise in delivery and provide an excellent door-to-door experience for customers.

Some restaurants are even going the extra mile by offering customers with delivery trackers to monitor food in real-time. In 2015, Domino’s created a GPS Driver Tracker that allows customers to track their pizza order. The tracking lets customers see when an order is leaving the store, the expected arrival time and a delivery driver’s profile. This personalized experience provides comfort to customers who may be cautious about getting food delivered to their home.

By taking the extra step to enhance the timeliness and safety of the delivery process, Dominos is going the extra mile to retain customers and provide excellent service every step of the way.

Step 6: Ask for Feedback / Talk to Your Customers
Customer feedback is a great way for you to improve your hospitality business as the restaurant industry continues to evolve. Although many managers find time to talk to consumers throughout the day, it’s hard to get deep insight from your customers in a short amount of time.

While traditional comment cards may do the trick, technology is making it easier than ever to receive feedback from customers. Websites such as Yelp and Google offer customers the option to leave public reviews on their third-party site, while Facebook provides you with a way to reach your customers for feedback and monitor reviews on your page.

While many customers are happy to share feedback, some businesses offer incentives for more detailed insights. By offering a discount or reward, you can incentivise customers to share their experience in details that you may have miss otherwise.

Step 7: Make Changes & Implement New Policies
To provide an exceptional customer experience, training and policies should evolve based on the feedback you receive from customers.

The key to any of these changes is great communication with your team from the top down. While some management retrains their staff regularly, others prefer to communicate changes at quarterly staff meetings. Regardless of the approach, your customers will recognize the positive experience they receive with each new change you implement.