The Face of Your Restaurant

The Face of Your Restaurant

by Paul Katsch

Whether you're an Italian Bistro, Mexican Taqueria, Western Steakhouse, or any other type of dining establishment, you're brand is built on more than your own marketing efforts. Once you get your patrons to your restaurant, your host or hostess is the very first impression they'll have of your company. So how well are your employees representing you?

Restaurants can be stressful environments, and a meal-time rush can come at you all at once. It's important to train all your employees to deliver service with a smile, and your front-of house staff need to be excellent problem solvers as well. The importance of the host or hostess is often overlooked, but they serve as the ambassador of your restaurant. One thing that can help the process is having a superior reservation management system, like DinnerWire, that makes it easier to take reservations and manage the floor. By minimizing the wait time, your hungry patrons can be sat quicker, maximizing your turnover and your potential for profit. Even with a reservation management and seating system, there will be times when you patrons just have to wait to be seated. This wait time affects their opinion of their service and experience at your restaurant, so is your host capable of keeping those patrons happy and making them feel valued?

Engage with the customer the moment they walk in the door, you have the opportunity to set the precedence for their experience. How do your staff greet your guests? Will they open the front door for them? Is your patrons' happiness your hosts' Number 1 priority? Satisfaction is directly correlated with expectations, and your host can help show your customer the quality of service they can expect. You don't want to under-estimate the wait time, and leave your customers feeling like you've forgotten about them. Quoting a longer than expected wait could lead them to be pleasantly surprised when they're sat sooner, but it can also point them to the door if the wait is overwhelmingly long. By training your hosts to anticipate this, they can word their conversation in a way that makes your customer feel like you're excited they chose your establishment for this dining experience. Your patrons have a variety of dining choices, it's up to you to demonstrate why no other restaurant compares, not just in food quality but in customer satisfaction.

So your host may have done a fantastic job getting your new customer in que to be seated and making them feel like their business is important to you. The next step is anticipating how your guest will experience their wait. Is there enough seating, a good ambiance, and something to occupy your patrons as they wait? Ultimately, it takes much more time and energy to put out problem fires as they rise than to prepare for the possibilities beforehand. When problems do arise (they're almost impossible to avoid), how will your host react? Nobody is perfect, and mistakes will be made, but what's more important is how they're handled. You can train someone how to go through the motions of a job, but it's much harder to teach people to have a good attitude. It's harder to change a negative opinion once it's been developed, so from your first interaction, how are you making your customer feel?

“People will forget what you said,
people will forget what you did,
but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
- Maya Angelou

Granted not every customer is a pleasant patron, so it's your employees' job to please even the most difficult of guest. It's difficult to work under the motto that “The customer is always right”, because in today's world it's taught customers that those that complain the loudest will get special treatment. What you also need to realize is that as important as it is to keep your rabble-rousers appeased, it shouldn't be at the cost of your other patrons' experience. Your quieter patrons may not make as big of a fuss in your restaurant, but in today's world your online customer reviews can make or break you. According to 2013 Socialnomics (http://youtu.be/QUCfFcchw1w), 90% of consumers trust peer recommendations, whereas only 14% trust advertisements. It's important to have a clearly established chain of command, so your hosts know when it's time to get a manager involved. Having an established process for comping or offering alternative added value will give your staff the ability to deal with these problems, and there needs to be safeguards to ensure these benefits aren't abused.

 What's the best way to ensure that your employees behave in a manner that ensures repeat business? Well the easy answer is to focus on hiring team members with a track record of superior customer service and a good attitude. Training can help, rather than expecting your employees to know how to deal with difficult situations, giving them wordage and tools to anticipate these situations will lead to a quicker response time. Possibly the best way to engage your front of house staff is by finding a way to help them make their job personal. Whether it's offering incentives for superior performers, rewarding with scheduled shifts, etc., as the employer you need to find a way to help your staff see your customers as their guests with a personal pride and responsibility for their treatment. They can be aware of the way you want to treat your guests, they can pay attention to your branding as a company, but when they find a substantial purpose for personal responsibility, you will undoubtedly see a call-to-action by your staff.