Customer service excellence has become an increasingly important aspect of running a successful restaurant.
If you’re looking to keep your business ahead of the curve, it’s time to learn what customer service excellence really means, and how you can implement it into your business so that you can keep your customers coming back time and time again.
The Definition of Customer Service
In restaurants and hotels, customer service refers to a range of advice and assistance services that employees provide to customers.
These services include greeting customers as they enter a restaurant or hotel, escorting them to their table or room, taking orders and serving food or drinks. Employees also assist customers with questions about menu items or hotel amenities.
They take payment for meals or rooms and process any additional requests from guests. The level of service an employee provides can have a significant impact on a guest’s overall experience at a restaurant or hotel.
The Best Ways to Improve Your Team’s Performance
Research says that most of us are only at our best when we’re not focused on ourselves. We need to be helping someone else to be at our best. Think about it: when you help another person, you lose yourself in them, and your focus shifts away from you.
When you don’t help another person, however, your focus shifts back toward yourself—to how tired or frustrated or bored you are—and it’s hard to be your best self when that happens.
So to improve your team’s performance, give them opportunities to serve others. The more they do so, the better they’ll perform for you (because they’ll be less distracted by their own needs).
9 Tips for Providing Excellent Customer Service
Building a strong customer service team is critical to a business’s success. In fact, many restaurants will state that excellent customer service and loyalty are their top priorities. But how do they ensure they’re providing a high level of service?
Great customer service starts with hiring employees who can work with people from different backgrounds and personality types, then empowering them to go above and beyond for each guest who enters your restaurant. Other tips include:
- Make sure your employees understand your mission and vision for customer service and then train them on how to achieve it.
- Empower your employees to make decisions based on their own judgment when customers are unhappy or have special requests.
- Train your staff to treat each customer as an individual, regardless of how they’re dressed or what language they speak.
- Make sure your employees know when and how to apologize and make amends with a customer if they’ve made a mistake.
- Provide consistent training for all employees on new menu items, specials, and promotions so that every employee can answer questions about them accurately.
- Set up a formal complaint process so that customers can get their issues resolved quickly and easily without having to go through multiple people in order to get help or answers.
- Make sure your employees are aware of customer service best practices, such as being attentive and friendly, remembering details about each customer’s preferences, using tact when dealing with difficult customers, etc.
- Empower your employees to do what they need to do for each guest regardless of company policy if it will make them happy and keep them coming back for more. 9. Train your staff on how to handle difficult situations, such as when a customer is drunk or has had too much to eat, and how to safely get them out of your restaurant without getting hurt themselves.
- Make sure that you always provide excellent customer service yourself, so that customers can see that you’re dedicated to providing a high level of service no matter what situation they’re in or who they are.
Check out Alpha’s POS Solution Guide to Staff Management
Alpha’s POS solution gives businesses a fast, efficient, modern solution to managing staff. Instead of paging through a notebook looking for wait times and shifts covered, managers can check up on their employees using an easy-to-use interface.
With reports on how much time each employee spends serving customers, Alpha also provides key insights into which staff is creating loyal customers and which ones need more training or instruction.
The POS platform also makes it easier to retain good staff by offering reward programs and tools to track overall performance.
Reach out to Alpha today to learn more about how we can help your business provide customer service excellence.
