Companies need to stress 'excellent guest service.' - restaurant industry

Companies need to stress "excellent guest service'

We are our own worst enemies when it comes to stressing company priorities, such as excellent "guest service.' It is not hard to understand that statement when you consider most companies have a priority or program of the month.

In our pursuit of excellence, we tend to shift precedences depending on last month's sales and profits, the latest sales promotion, and the company president's latest trip to the competition. How often has a new guest service program been implemented only to die an untimely death because of a decision to move on to the next new plan?

Excellent guest service is a highly perishable product. It is extremely delicate and cannot be stored for future use. It is spontaneous. Once given, it is lost, and whatever you did yesterday is gone because today is a new day with new expectations from your guest that demand good service.

In addition to the program of the month, we speak of excellent guest service, but our actions do not back up our words. We require our managers to do so much semimeaningful administrative work along with filling in on an hourly schedule that they do not have the time to manage positive guest service in their restaurants.

It seems we add new management responsibilities because of a crisis or new sales promotion or menu item, but we do not seem to remove the burdens when the crucial time has passed.

As organizations, we must put our money where our mouths are.

Does your bonus program have a reward for excellent guest service? If it does not, then you are not sending a clear communication that excellent guest service is important. People respond to incentives or to things you make consequential.

One reason some hotels consistently achieve high marks with the guest when it comes to service is that a large portion of their bonuses is based on a tangible measure of guest satisfaction. The whole process of managing guest satisfaction is pretty critical. Most companies do not have a perceptible measure for evaluation of service.

They go by a feeling or some other apparition. Our policies are another way we do not allow excellent guest service. The following systems are examples of barriers preventing people from performing excellent service.

Managers not having the flexibility to handle guest complaints.

Outdated scheduling guidelines.

Too many tables per waiter or waitress work station.

Too many other side responsibilities for the waiter or waitress.

The organization's attitudes about achieving profit at all costs.

Take a look at your policies to make sure they are not a barrier to positive guest service.

Ronald Zenke and Karl Albrecht, in "Service America,' talk about the "moments of truth, which occur when our employees come in contact with a guest. Those guest contact people have the biggest impact on our guest service.

But how much time and money do we spend to get excellent people? To be successful with excellent guest service, we have to hire guest-oriented people--those with hospitality traits. I feel we have very outdated attitudes about hiring personnel.

For the most part, we still believe that good employees are easy to recruit and that if we do not like them, we can get rid of them, and there will be 10 new ones to take their place.

When was the last occasion your company spent any time or money on developing an effective employee retention program?

Do we take the trouble to evaluate the treatment of our employees? Do we handle them fairly?

Do we take action against managers and supervisors who are unjust?

One of the great legends of our industry, J.W. Marriott Sr., said, "If you take care of your employees, they will take care of your customers.'

Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman said the same thing in their book "In Search of Excellence': "Customer relations mirror employee relations.'

We know companies spend a lot of money evaluating a new site for business potential but spend no money or thought on evaluating the employee potential of that market. For some reason most managers feel that if they can just hire someone, then they are ahead of the game. We as an organization have not helped much because we have not equipped our managers to hire people who have hospitality traits.

We spend tons of money on bricks and morgar, but yet we do not allocate funds for managers to use when hiring in difficult recruiting markets.

Employees can be recruited in many effective ways, but they cost money.

Organizations send very strong messages about their commitment to excellent guest service in other manners. Let's explore some of them:

Who is fired and promoted?

Does your management hiring profile include people who have "hospitality traits?'

In the promotion of management is the only criterion a profit producer?

Do we look past the result and examine how that profit was achieved?

What are the top-down communications?

Every message must be consistent with the goal of excellent guest service.

The message cannot be counterproductive to achieving the objective.

As you can see, even when we have the best intentions to provide our guests with excellent service, we fall into all kinds of traps that block that intention.

Wanting excellent guest service is easy; providing it is another matter.

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COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group