Do you know that a friendly team could be one of the top reasons why a person becomes a loyal customer?
Yes, it is true, friendliness of the service can greatly impact the overall experience of our customers that would make them return to our restaurant again and again.
The friendliness of your service matters excessively in the restaurant business because people demand the service to be friendly all the time.
Friendliness can be defined in many ways, smiling, the posture, and the attitude of our servers, their body language, the words they use.
From the minute customers walk into the restaurant to the second they leave, it needs to be exceeding their expectations in the friendly department.
I tell our people all the time that this is the friendliest place in town. We have the friendliest service in town, that's who we are in this company. We want to share our identity, our standard, and this is the team you are in.
You may want to have a lot of training for the friendliness of your team because it is very critical.
One of the factors that we need to keep in mind is that it's easy to be friendly to friendly people. And this is not what we are talking about when it comes to the restaurant business.
What we are speaking of is being friendly and smiling big, in circumstances when it is really hard to do that.
Circumstances such as there is an issue with an or order or a customer just being rude, this the best time to be friendly and smile.
Killing people with kindness in those challenging times.
Exceeding expectations by showing customers what they don't expect from you to do.
Like when you get yelled at, and they are expecting you to get defensive, you are not going to meet that expectation.
You are going to exceed that expectation by reacting totally the other way. Apologizing, smiling, and saying "I fully understand where you're coming from, I am sorry about that. Let me take care of this..."
Redefining friendliness when it comes to providing great customer service in your restaurant can go a long way.
Utmost courtesy in dealing with somebody with these issues, that is the art that we are training our people to do.
The art of training our people to handle these different circumstances.
Having role-plays, not just for upselling, but also role-plays for managing difficult customers like a pro.
We need to train our people by all means because you can't just expect them to know how to behave in these tough situations.
And if they are not handling it well, it is on us to train them up and equip them to do well.
So what are some of the ways that we can measure friendliness?
One is by rating your staff based on observations. You can ask your friend of the house manager. Like, "On a scale of 1 to 10, how do you think so and so are doing when it comes to service this or that?" That's one way to gauge each of your team member's friendliness.
Another thing that you can do is to check and verify customer's feedback. When you look upon your online reviews, that hopefully left with lots of 5 stars, is there a mention of service? You need to read your reviews with the front of the house manager and brainstorm what is the mention of service. What can be the things that your customers appreciate very much?
We want our service to be friendly.
Be consistent in measuring your staff's friendliness.
Check your reviews if they do it consistently.
Again, the consistency of whatever we do matters tremendously.
For us to provide great service, and be consistent in giving that to our customers, we must define what great customer service is and what it looks like.
In fact, it is not only important for you and me to do this.
But it is necessary that every team member in our restaurant, whether they are folks in the kitchen or in the front of the house, understands what great customer service is so we can all be on the same page.
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