How Better Staffing Can Lead to More Satisfied Guests

Regardless of how much time and effort you invest in creating a quality product, a consistent service experience, and a pleasant environment for your guests, there is bound to be someone who walks away from your restaurant dissatisfied. And that is okay… just so long as you have a way to address the negative experience, accept responsibility for it, and work to resolve any doubt your customer may have about your restaurant afterwards. With a solid guest engagement and recovery solution in place, this piece of the service delivery process no longer needs to be something you dread tackling.

That being said, what if you could improve your chances of providing a positive dining experience before it reaches the point of recovery?

A Synergistic Relationship

Restaurants consist of many moving pieces — all of which work together and rely on one another in order to create a holistic unit:

• The kitchen: develops the menu and creates the food
• The bar: manages the drink offerings and prepares the beverages
• The FOH staff: delivers those offerings and manages the guests’ expectations and experience
• The management: creates and manages the processes, the teams, and the overall service experience

The focus here really is on the people and less on the product. If your restaurant already has a steady flow of traffic and returning customers, you don’t have to worry about your product offering. Your focus needs to be on keeping those customers happy through your service, and the best place to start is with your people.

For an industry with such a high employee turnover rate (Black Box Intelligence is claiming this number to be around 110% currently), it’s incredibly important to hire the right people the first time. Why? Because losing an employee and hiring a replacement is extremely costly in terms of time, money, and energy for everyone involved. Multiply the costs of recruitment, interviews, hiring, onboarding, and training times the amount of new hires you have to make each year and you’ll get the point.

In addition, there are the negative consequences felt on the customer side. Your guests come to expect a certain level of service and consistency, but that can’t always be guaranteed when current staff are preoccupied with training and supervising and when new employees are just getting the hang of things.

Merging the Proactive and Reactive

While much of the focus within a restaurant is placed on the symbiotic relationship between teams working together, a bigger emphasis should be placed on the synergy between those teams (especially the customer-facing ones) and the guest. If you don’t have a happy team, a well-trained team, a team that fully believes in your company’s values, or a team that envisions a future with your company, your guests are going to feel it.

That is why you should focus on better hiring practices. By getting the right people onboard, you can mitigate for that later risk of an unhappy employee leading to an unhappy guest. Here are some ways you can start making improvements now:

• Recruit from the right places: Start with the people you know. Referrals tend to be stronger candidates since they come from people you trust (and that trust you). Outside of that, look to reputable job board sources or invest some money into advertising open positions.
• Hire for the right reasons: It can be often feel like you need to rush into hiring someone — anyone — because your team is feeling the pressure of being understaffed and overworked. Don’t let that rush you into making a hiring decision that can cost you time, money, and energy because you brought in someone who didn’t align with your company values or goals.
• Ask the right questions: By now, you should have a set of questions you ask of any new employee. Make sure those questions get to the crux of what you’re looking for in each specific role and identify who will best align with your goals: What is their availability? How dedicated do they seem to work in previous positions? Do they have a customer-first mentality? How do they feel about working in a team? Where do they see themselves in the future either in the short-term or long-term?
• Use the right tools: Once onboard, your team expects a certain amount of support as well as ease in their work. Find technology that improves their ability to work and interact. Establish training procedures that make sense and are applicable for all learning types. Create processes that are easy to follow and that will feel natural to them when implementing.
• Promote the right values: Your team needs to know that you appreciate their contribution to the restaurant and to the role they play with your guests. Develop a system of training, support, communication, and rewards that acknowledges what they do, helps them grow as you do, and gives them the opportunity to take on more.

Remember: a guest recovery process is great for ensuring that potentially unhappy guests are taken care of. But it’s also important to have a process in place that makes sure you’re planning for a happy future with your customers rather than waiting to offer compensation when something goes wrong. By bringing on the right people the first time, you can spend more time fostering a better relationship with your team and consequently showing them how to develop better relationships with your customers.