Building a Better Guest Experience in your Restaurant

For a restaurant to be truly successful it should offer incredible food and excellent service to its customers enticing them to come back again and again. A guest experience can be enhanced simply by employing a mix of training exercises along with gathering customer input.

Involving Restaurant Guests to Improve Customer Service

Comment Cards

A restaurant relies on repeat customers as well as new arrivals. It’s important to involve them in order to help improve the overall experience. That can be achieved simply by giving your guest comment cards to fill out. Questions on the comment card should be varied, giving them an opportunity to voice their opinions about the quality of service they received.

Was the food served promptly?

Did your food server take care of all your needs?

Was your food server courteous and attentive?

Did your food server offer suggestions for advertised specials?

It’s important for restaurants to know how their guests feel about the service they received.

Additional Customer Service Tips

1) Comprehensive and Ongoing Training

A good restaurant should develop a sound orientation program designed to give new members of its wait staff comprehensive training on food service. For established wait staff, it’s also important for restaurants to implement an ongoing training program so that the quality of customer service can be maintained and improved. The comment cards turned in by guests can go a long way in helping to determine the type of training required to better serve the needs of guests.

2) Hire the Correct Wait Staff

Being a good waiter/food server is more than just delivering food to restaurant guests. It’s about being able to multi-task. Having a clean look, a courteous attitude and the ability to give customers exactly what they want and need are attributes that go a long way in improving the overall guest experience.

3) Acknowledge Each and Every Guest

It shouldn’t only be the wait staff that’s ensuring that each guest is receiving quality customer service. It should be a shared responsibility. A good front-of-house manager should be invested in their guests’ quality of service as well. They need to be checking in at each table to ensure their experience has been enjoyable. On-duty managers and chefs likewise should be actively engaging guests, making them feel welcome. A good manager will be able to gauge how much attention guests want as some like to be left in peace.

Word of Mouth is the Best Advertisement

Restaurants rely heavily on word of mouth in terms of its reputation. If a guest has enjoyed their experience, they’ll share that with others. However, they’re also far more likely to share a bad experience than a good one.

It becomes incumbent upon any restaurant to utilize whatever tools and resources available to help improve the quality of customer service. By employing the right training solutions to reach that goal, restaurants can easily improve the overall guest experience and avoid the stigma that a bad customer service ranking can bring.

One final tip, be sure to monitor social media so that you can quickly respond to compliments, and even more importantly to complaints.

What strategies does your restaurant employ to build a better guest experience? Leave a comment below.

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