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The Hospitality Advantage: The Same Fundamentals of Guest Engagement Still Apply

Last week I placed an order with a local independent restaurant whose food I particularly enjoyed when it was open for on-premises service. Their online ordering and payment system was easy to navigate. I received clear communications via text messages the restaurant's acknowledgment of my order and when I should arrive to pick it up. The digital experience was just fine.

In industry icon Danny Meyer's classic restaurant business tome Setting The Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business, he credits genuine caring hospitality as the biggest driver of his restaurant's success over the past 30 years.. Writes Meyer, "Business, like life, is all about how you make people feel." And this is how your independent restaurant will succeed in spite of the pandemic.

When I arrived to retrieve my order, the staff member was not only disinterested but dismissive. I have experienced warmer hospitality in school cafeteria lunch lines. I've become a pretty decent cook, and for what I paid for the meal I could have put together a nice meal and a bottle of wine to enjoy during the preparation.

If your vision of the future of the restaurant business is ghost kitchens and robotics, you don't need to know how to help your staff provide hospitality during this challenging time. If you rely on guests coming to your business to pick up food or be seated with social distancing and masked servers, you better raise the bar on your hospitality if you want them to return again.

In regard to my disappointing experience with the aforementioned restaurant, I have to bear in mind the owners and employees are under tremendous stress trying to keep the business running.

I realize we all have to be a little more forgiving during this time. People are hurting. Businesses are struggling. That said, restaurants are not just in the business of selling prepared food. They are also in the business of offering good cheer. The most fundamental definition of hospitality is "kindness to strangers."

Always Learning…

In the article, we will share information presented by RestaurantOwner.com president Jim Laube and RestaurantOwner.com resident hospitality training expert Kelli Laube. While these issues might seem so basic to the restaurant business, a lot of operators take them for granted. And in doing so, their manager and team are forgetting hospitality basics during a time when it is easy for guests to forget about their business.

Your Most Important Number

If you've been reading this magazine or have been a member of RestaurantOwner.com for a while, you know we emphasize the importance of knowing your numbers. Financial management is critical to a business in which winning and losing can be a few percentage points of margin. We always start with our profit-and-loss statement (our "P&L").

The P&L's "top line" is sales, followed by our costs and expenses, and then our "bottom line", our net income. That said, what is our most important number? It is your sales. Without sales you don't have a bottom line. You don't have a business. Sales drives everything else.

And the biggest driver of sales is your guest experience. Marketing and promotion can get customers to visit your restaurant in the first place. And they are important; however, a one-off customer is not going to make you money unless you are a quick-service chain restaurant on an interstate highway with expensive billboards to guide them to your door.

The guest experience makes or breaks the guest loyalty and repeat patronage that keeps concepts going for decades. The food alone is rarely going to carry the guest experience. When your entire team connects with the guest it creates positive feelings that last well beyond the meal. As you work to navigate business during this crisis, this is a good time to consider your hospitality fundamentals.

Put People First

Restaurant consultant Michael Tingsager, a colleague and friend in the United Kingdom, uses the phrase "Put People First and Boost Performance" in his social media tag line. After years of talking to the best of the best in the restaurant industry, I find his wisdom unassailable.

If you had a good team going into the pandemic, hopefully you were able to bring many if not all of them back. That said, it is not unusual to find your staff have moved on to other jobs in the interim. You might need staff and you might be more concerned about filling positions than the quality of hires. This is particularly true if you have converted a significant portion of your business to take away and delivery.

If you are operating with a smaller crew, the likelihood increases that any member of your staff will have guest contact. On any shift, any one of them might be answering the telephone to take an order or running food to a waiting car. All of these interactions are critical touch points that can influence whether or not the guest returns or recommends your restaurant to others.

Particularly if your business prior to the pandemic was primarily full-service, you might think take-out customers are simply hungry and as long as the food is good they will be happy. And for some guests that is true; however, consider quick-service chain Chick-Fil-A dominated this sector with its reputation for polite, hospitable staff. And that was before COVID-19.

As the pandemic drags on, people have pent up need for social interaction. A cheerful greeting and friendly exchange during a brief transaction could make some- one's day. Moreover, hospitality is infectious (in a good way). Cheerful staff can energize everyone in the house.

You need to select staff and management for attitude now more than ever. "For me, serving is incredibly dynamic and it is so fun," says Kelli, "Every day at every shift, you're dealing with different personalities, different people. It's incredibly fun. For me, I love the challenge of turning around a grumpy table. What I mean is when you go up and greet them and they're just not happy or they're frustrated and by the end of the meal, you can put a smile on their face -- serving is just dynamic; it's awesome."

Tools and Training

Hiring for attitude is only a start, says Kelli. "To provide good hospitality a staff member needs confidence. And to have confidence, he or she needs competence." She explains this requires systems and training.

Consider Pal's Sudden Service, a 30-unit quick service restaurant business based in Johnson City, Tennessee and with operations throughout the Southeast. Pal's earned a Malcolm Baldrige Award, which recognizes business with consistent and measurable high levels of quality of their products and service. Pal's is the only restaurant business that has received this prestigious award, which goes to enterprises that apply rigo tion of systems and procedures.

Pal's managers are assigned to personally observe counter personnel greetings and taking orders. They are more than supervisors; they are coaches who provide feedback to help staff improve their service.

Pal's leaves nothing to chance. As part of their systems they have a 16-point checklist to greet each guest when they pull up in their vehicle. Certainly, in this age of masked service, we don't get to enjoy each other's smiles; however, consider every other aspect of body language we associate with hospitality and genuine warmth. Indeed, Pal's checklist addresses smiles, eye contact, timing, posture, body position and more.

Does it work? Pal's managers are partners, not employees, and they have a stake in this drive-through only business. When the business does well, they can make as much as $400,000 per year. And where are they positioned during the peak meal periods -- where people order and are served the food. This is where guests are won and lost. Restaurant Owner.com provides tools and training to help you systematize your hospitality and take those cheerful staff members to hospitality professionals that win you repeat business.

Always Learning…

Second Their Emotions

Behavioral Scientist Renee Brown is quoted as saying: "People are not rational beings with occasional emotion. They are emotional beings with occasional rational thought."

"Now some of you might consider yourselves to be very logical and I'm sure you are," says Jim Laube. "You're business people, and you're serious about what you do. But I want you to think back about the last car or the last house you bought. Also think about the person you married. Were your decisions based more on logic or emotion? Okay, I rest my case."

We are emotional creatures and we respond to how things affect us at an emotional level. If you start with the premise that people are fundamentally emotional and not logical, it will really change the way you think about your guest experience.

Think about what would happen if your restaurant is able to produce more of these positive emotions or feelings. What would happen to your guest perception or your guest experience?

Even with masks and social distancing, there are ways for you and your staff to evoke positive guest emotions. Consider proxemics, the behavior relating to space that people feel it necessary to set between themselves and others. We know except for shaking hands, we rarely have a need to be closer than six feet from strangers to interact with them in a positive manner. There is no reason not to acknowledge any guest when he or she gets within six feet. You have to acknowledge them.

Evoking positive emotions can be as simple as "saying good afternoon or being helpful," says Laube, adding, "We had a restaurantowner.com workshop in Austin a few years ago. A bunch of us went out to a restaurant. I was on my way to the restroom. Didn't know where it was and a server that was actually carrying a tray of food to a table noticed me looking around. She said, 'Are you looking for the restroom?' and I said, 'Yes.' She escorted me. It wasn't very far away but she actually escorted me to the door. I noticed on the way back, I went by the hostess stand and the hostess stand looked up and smiled at me. I walked by a busser, the busser looked up at me, gave me eye contact and smiled at me. I felt like I was in the friendliest restaurant on the planet, it was amazing."

To appreciate the importance of his anecdote, we learned nothing about what he ate or even what type of restaurant it was -- casual, family, or upscale. We only learned how the staff made him feel.

And that is what your guests will remember about your restaurant even if their only interaction with your business is a masked staff member handing them a bag of food through a car window.

THANK YOU FOR CALLING

During reopening, many independent operators are requiring reservations to ensure proper social distancing during wait times. You might find you are receiving more telephone reservations than ever before, in spite of online reservations systems. It is critical your staff convey hospitality and warmth on the telephone, rather than a rushed conversation signaling they have more important things to do than talk to the people who are keeping you in business.