Customer Service: Get your priorities straight!

So you’re advertising your restaurant, but you still haven’t figured out your customer service? Interesting!

Your restaurant started out pretty well but recently you recognized a gradual decline in patrons, so you chose to advertise your restaurant via some medium to boost your sales. Advertising is one way to get customers through the door, but the real question is what is actually being done to provide service excellence and accordingly retain your customers? One thing to note is food and customer service are complimentary to each other; poor service – just like poor food - will take away from the dining experience for the customer. You may have your food figured out but how about your service?

Word of mouth advertising is one of the best ways of attracting customers to a restaurant. If you treat your customers well then they will be good to you and invite or tell their friends. Before you advertise to attract more patrons, check your internal processes to ensure that the problem does not exist within the service.

Customer service gives any restaurant a competitive advantage because it’s rare to encounter and often memorable when it does happen. Training and development is crucial to the success of an organization. People that work within the restaurant need to possess the correct knowledge and skills to successfully deliver exceptional service. The chef in the kitchen and the wait staff are equally important, people will come for the food but the customer service is what keeps them coming.

I remember working at my first restaurant: my experience was that I started work one day and was literally thrown to the wolves the next (serving customers), without being trained and not knowing the way the restaurant operates. That was overwhelming! I’m sure I did not perform my best that day and one of the major reasons was due to being untrained and incompetent at doing my job.  One may think it’s a no-brainer job, but the finest wait staff will tell you that it took continuous investment in training and development to be outstanding and remain there.

Before you actually invest in advertising, get your priorities straight! There are many ways to improve your organization’s customer service. In my almost 10 years experience in the customer these are my suggestions to grow and retain your important customer base, improve your employees level of customer service and improve you bottom line.  Seek critique from and listen to your customers, I can’t say this enough but take nothing for granted, continuously train staff be that new and old, and finally reward and motivate employees.

Stay tuned and comment for further development!

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