Customer Service is highly regarded and expected in restaurants. Customers pay and dine in your restaurant to expect a quality service and fulfilling experience. Although your restaurant may serve good food or drinks but with bad customer service, customers would be turned away and reluctant to patronise your restaurant anymore. Thus, this would greatly affect the revenue of your restaurant. Imagine having 4 loyal customers who are satisfied with the service and the food at your restaurant and they become your regulars, the amount they spend in your restaurant each time they visit will add up to a significant difference in the sales revenue. Therefore, it is important to ensure that all of your restaurant staff provide good customer service and go the extra mile for customers’ needs and wants. Such action would be appreciated by the customers and increasing the overall customer satisfaction in your restaurant.
Here are some tips to improve your customer service:
Tip #1 – “Customers First” Mindset
Customers always come first. When walking in the restaurant, your staff may cross paths with different customers who may want to enter the restaurant or go to the washroom. Always be patient and let the customer walk first instead of trying to squeeze into the narrow pathway.
Tip #2 – Smile and Greet
Ensure that staff always smile while greeting and serving. Smiling gives out warmth to customers and brightens their day. Staff also appears positive with a ready-to-serve attitude. If staff know the names of the customers (eg, Regular Customers), they can greet the customers by their name, creating a personalised experience for the customers.
Tip #3 – Take Initiative
Go the extra miles and achieve customer satisfaction. Encourage staff to take initiative while serving customers such as, refilling up water when half-filled or empty, go around tables to check if they need extra condiments or how they find the food/drinks.
Tip #4 – Making Conversations
Instead of being just a regular “waiter/waitress”you can train your staff to appear friendly to customers by making conversations. For example, when taking their orders, your staff can enlighten the atmosphere by providing genuine recommendations as to how a certain food tastes like. By doing so, they will come off as friendlier and genuine, forging a good customer-staff relationship. The customers will feel that they are being treated specially as compared to other restaurants and are more likely to patronise your restaurant again due to the good experience they had.
Tip #5 – Proper Way of Serving Dishes
Educate your staff about the proper way of handling and serving dishes to the customers’ table. (Eg, Serve cups with restaurant logos facing the customers, Avoid touching the tip of the glass for hygienic reasons etc.) This shows that the staff are well-trained and customers would be pleased with the service rendered. It gives your restaurant a good reputation as your staff abide to all the F&B standards of serving.
Tip #6 – Handle Complaints Well
If there are any commotion or complaints from the customers, staff should always remain calm and not retaliate back in anger. Even if the customers have made unreasonable demands or nasty remarks, staff should always keep their composure and not fire back with any harsh words or vulgarities. This shows the professionalism of your staff, which also brings out the good reputation of your restaurant.
If there are any arising situations that the staff cannot handle, the staff should also respond something along the line that they will get their manager to speak to them nicely, instead of a dismissing tone or just walking away which the customer can deem as rude and it adds a reason for him/her to write in complaining about the hostile service.
Tip #7 – Come up with a Customer-Service House Rule Poster
Based on all the tips above, you can come up with a customer-service house rule poster in your restaurant and enforce everyone to abide by the rule. Every morning before the beginning of your restaurant operations, you can hold a meeting to remind everyone about the service that is expected of them, and revise any situations regarding any unpleasant feedback made by customers the day before. This is so to instill the importance of customer service in the service staff so that they will take customer service seriously.
