The Happiness of Hospitality Through Service

A restaurant’s front-of-house team represents the brand as arguably its most valuable asset. They embody hospitality and serve to rectify, assuage, or adapt to the customer’s needs. FOH is the face of the brand.

With thousands of potential failure points in any guest experience, the server is the primary key to the identification and resolution of any issues. Well-trained and valuable employees provide service to keep guests happy and returning so that their frequency drives same store sales, which means we need to know how well each server delivers happiness.

Any restaurant operator will tell you talented staff with adaptive training is the cornerstone for running a good business. Consider insight from chairman and CEO of Yum! Brands David Novak:  “The most important thing you can do as a leader is create an environment where everyone knows that what they do makes a difference.”

How can a restaurant ensure their servers are evolving, growing and continuing to be a positive representation of the brand?

On-boarding is often the extent of training, but it’s actually only the start of building hospitality-focused talent with an understanding of their impact. Most brands expect those first few weeks to convey everything necessary about hospitality and therefore dedicate ongoing training to perfunctory menu change knowledge or regulatory safety. Training programs also typically treat all employees the same rather than identifying each team member’s unique needs, largely because we’ve never been able to identify individualized need

How can a restaurant ensure their servers are evolving, growing and continuing to be a positive representation of the brand? More importantly, how do you have a happy and productive workforce who knows how to truly deliver hospitality? The answer is data at scale to understand how each server is performing every day and what their unique opportunities are.

Data on the facilitation of service has transformed other industries as best illustrated by the Amazon retail effect, yet hospitality largely relies on what can be observed by the human eye when it comes to anything other than sales. That’s arguably supplemented by a mystery dining shop to manage their front line staff with the extremes of online reviews being their best effort of understanding the day-to-day perceptions of the brand. Data on service should provide insight into what elements are working overall with more detailed insights available by individual server. With access to such information, an operator can better celebrate the wins, coach and counsel on the negative, and create training plans based on information that historically hasn’t been available.

How would a restaurant get such quantities of data to inform service with the same granularity as it manages costs? The answer: ask the guest.

How do you have a happy and productive workforce who knows how to truly deliver hospitality?

Technology can enable a direct and at-scale solution as to how your staff is performing overall and in detail against metrics that you define, typically known as steps-of-service. Comment cards included in the check presenter and post-dining emails have been used, but rarely deliver data at scale. Likewise, post-dining emails engage a select number of guests with incentives. Feedback must be at scale to create a happiness score by server and to inform staff training, 

Engaging the guest at the point of payment delivers the right time and reason to start a conversation. A device like Yumpingo’s digital bill, is given to guests with the check presenter post-meal with a few questions related to product and service.  Its brevity, timeliness, and appropriateness allows for the digital collection, organization, and digestion of guest data on sentiment at scale.

If an operator has hundreds of data points by server per week, they can have conversations based on fact rather than feeling or observation. 

If an operator has hundreds of data points by server per week, they can have conversations based on fact rather than feeling or observation. This makes managing a team easier because operators work best to manage what is measured. From there, they can create merit-based scheduling, and peer-to-peer programs by linking strengths/weaknesses. For example, if an employee’s recent reviews showed they lack wine knowledge, a manager can require that the server completes a wine module of training prior to the next shift.  Similarly, a server with a perfect ‘happiness score’ can be recognized.

If an operator has hundreds of data points by server per week, they can have conversations based on fact rather than feeling or observation. 

A digitally driven approach to the collection of guest feedback and the implementation of that data to inform staff training will create an environment where your team can thrive because you then help each employee succeed by knowing exactly where they may be struggling. Time is money, as they say. Make your staff training effective by first informing management on where your staff performance stands.