Restaurant Owners - How Important are People Skills?

You are serving great food. Your establishment is new, spotless and inviting and yet you are not getting the repeat visits that you expect. What's up? What's going wrong?

The answer may lie with your people skills?

Why do people come to your restaurant?By now you should know why people frequent your restaurant?or at least you should know why they don't.

They do not come for cheap food. It's cheaper at home and there is certain to be cheaper restaurants than yours.

They certainly come to eat different foods that they cannot make at home but there are plenty of similar restaurants to yours.

So you will have worked out your "unique selling benefit" and you will have marketed that. They don't come back and you have to discover what it is that is not providing the benefit that they were expecting.

Often the answer is with your people.Customers come for the total experience. It will not matter whether the food is excellent and the coffee outstanding if the waiting staff is unfriendly and distant. Their evening will have been ruined and they will not come back again.

When you employ front-of-house employees their technical skills are not as important as their attitude.

You can teach a person the technical skills but it is almost impossible to teach them to change their attitudes. If your applicant finds it difficult to smile during her interview then she is certain to be an unsmiling distant waitress. She is not for you.

A warm and friendly applicant with little experience is by far the better prospect.

What about your own people skills?In our consulting we quite often see managers whose dealing with patrons is excellent but with staff and others atrocious.

Never give your staff a 'dressing down' in front of customers. It makes customers uncomfortable at best and downright angry if they have established a rapport with the staff member.

Your attitude toward staff should be one that leads them to better service and higher morale.

Will they ever need strong criticism? They sure will?but keep it between yourselves.

http://ww.profitstrategies4business.com

About the Author

Kelvyn Peters CPA is one of the longest serving Australian Tax Agents. He registered as tax agent in 1962 and was accepted as a CPA in 1964.

He has become much sought after as an educator and speaker on small business. One organisation says that the highlight of the annual meeting is Kelvyn's ability to present the audited statements in a humorous way.

Kelvyn is famous for his ability to rescue ailing small businesses.

http://profitstrategies4business.com

More Resources

Unable to open RSS Feed $XMLfilename with error HTTP ERROR: 404, exiting

More Customer Service Information:

Related Articles

Automating Your Help Desk Workflow
Do you know you can open, answer, close and report help desk information without human intervention?Automation is a powerful feature provided by most enterprise level help desk products; however, most organizations rarely take advantage of these features. Based on a survey conducted by RightStar Systems, only 5% of the help desk managers interviewed were using automation to its fullest capacity.
The Logic of Emotion!
Homebuyers are an interesting study. Watching people make their home buying decisions has brought me to the conclusion that every decision that every one of us makes is based in emotion.
Customer Service For Huge Profits
Customer service is the most vital asset for Businesseither it is online or offline. It's the critical factorwhich determines if your business has a future or not.
How Do You Create Customer Loyalty?
Another sad fact of life is that these days, very few customers are loyal. Most of their loyalties lie with their bank accounts, and you can't blame people for watching their shrinking dollars.
Are You Giving Your Customers Enough Reasons To Return To Your Business?
Good customer service just isn't enough anymore in the marketplace in which we live. Times are changing and business owners are learning that they need to create such an awesome customer loyalty program that they are always at the forefront of their customers' minds on a regular basis.
Top 10 customer service tips
1. Hire people who have a service attitude.
Aint We Wonderful!
It may come as a surprise to you to discover that customers don't buy your products or services because they feel that you have a right to make a profit. In other words, their motive for doing business with you is not to help you buy the latest Jaguar or put your children through college.
Losing Angry Customers
This article offers five ways to help you deal with angry customers. While the goal of all businesses is to have only happy customers, we also have to be realistic and realize sometimes we are going to anger a customer.
Restaurant Owners - How Important are People Skills?
You are serving great food. Your establishment is new, spotless and inviting and yet you are not getting the repeat visits that you expect.
Add Value - And Kill Mediocrity in Customer Service
There are two kinds of customer service we all experience occasionally, outstanding customer service, and bad customer service. What we experience most of the time is mediocre customer service.
Doesnt Anybody Work Here? Nametags Impact Employee Communication
Walmart was the first business to require all its employees to wear nametags. (There's a surprise!) Sam Walton created this initiative because he wanted his customers to "get to know the people they bought from.
Whats Love Got To Do With It?
Customer Loyalty, we all want it. Don't we?Some people say it's dead - they say that customers are fickle, that they don't want loyalty, that they just want the lowest price and the fastest way to get it.
CEM Can Improve Customer Loyalty
'A 5 percent increase in customer retention increases profits by 25 to 95 percent.''The greater the loyalty of customers, employees, suppliers, and shareholders, the greater the profits reaped .
Complaining Consumers
The salesman's job is to be well informed; extremely well informed. For this information is how he earns his bread.
Proofs of Delivery and Logistics: Speeding Throughput and Avoiding Pitfalls
It should be a straightforward business scenario: making sure that the delivery documentation from the supplier or haulier matches up with the documentation at the target destination.However life is rarely straightforward, and if problems do arise, order completion times and cash flow will inevitably suffer as a result.
Take Care of Yourself Before You Take Care of Your Customer
One of the most important questions people ask when they are focused on improving their quantity and quality of business is: "What is my competitive advantage? What makes me unique, memorable, special? what truly sets me apart from the rest?" While there are no definitively right answers to that question, most people come to some conclusion that customer service is a critical component of your competitive advantage. For most businesses, the service they offer can vary from exceptional to not so hot, depending upon circumstances.
Call Center Software - Your Tool of Choice in Customer Relations
The call center represents your first line of communication with customers and potential customers. Whether you choose to outsource this service or to establish an in-company call center, this is one area in which quality is paramount and cannot be compromised.
From Disgruntled to Champion - How to Turn an Unhappy Client Into Your Best Customer
It's a salesperson's worst nightmare- the phone call that comes in from a disgruntled customer. Not only does it create extra work for you, but it cuts into your valuable selling time.
Creating the Right 'Viral Reputation'
Unless you are brand new to business, or have been under a rock for quite some time - one key marketing technique (which isn't new) - is called 'Viral'.Based on the word 'virus' - viral marketing or viral business simply means it 'spreads' like a virus.
How Not to Get Stiffed, Improving Your Collection Procedures
Some businesses have slow paying customers or past due balances because they didn't "train" their customers in the beginning.It is important that your customers know your credit policy and/or terms of payment, BEFORE they become a customer.