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

Customer Satisfaction Is Your Business
Regardless of what business you are in - you are really in the business of satisfying customers. The degree of customer satisfaction you deliver determines the level of long-term success you will achieve in business.
Profit from a Customer Service Recovery Program
A client recently said to me: "Most days things seem to run smoothly; but whenever we have a customer complaint, we seem to collapse. Where are we going wrong?"How you handle and solve customer concerns and complaints is a measure of your standing in the "excellent", "bad", or "mediocre" category of customer service.
Communicating Value
Abstract: People buy for their reasons, not yours. This article covers the key elements that prospects want to hear you talk about.
Transforming Disgruntled Customers into Your Biggest Advocates
"I am writing to complain about the widget I bought from your site the other day."Sell anything and eventually you will be on the receiving end of a sentence like this.
Customer Service and The Human Experience
Historically, customer service was delivered over the phone or in person. Customers didn't have many choices, and switching to competitors was cumbersome.
The Number 1 Rule for Businesses - Be Professional
Have you ever walked into a store and things looked sloppy? Stores should have nice neat displays, right? Normally, yes, but sometimes they get a bit messy on busy days and we all understand how that can happen.But what if you were to walk into a store as soon as it opened in the morning and the place looked liked it had been ransacked? What would you think?You'd probably think it wasn't very professional-looking.
Customer Service: Everyone is Fighting Their Own Personal Battles
Relationships..
Dont Eliminate The Middle Man - Add One
Today, there are situations when we actually add a "middle person" instead of eliminating one for increased service efficiency. If it's cost-effective and demand is high, then proper market positioning will make it a worthwhile endeavor.
Increase in Customer Sales = Increase in Customer Service
One of the most popular questions asked in online business forums or even by my customers and subscribers is this :"How the hell can I increase my sales?"or"I've got tons of visitors but nobody seems to be buying anything? What gives?"FISHNETS WITH HOLES? ANYONE?Getting traffic is not the be all and end all of a successful online business. It requires skills, specific online marketing strategies designed for your site and a robust customer service strategy.
Dealing with Difficult People
1. Don't get Hooked !!!When people behave towards you in a manner that makes youfeel angry, frustrated or annoyed - this is known as a Hook.
Businesses Need to Rehumanise
Big companies and corporations have lost the human touch. The question is, when will humanity catch on, or like robotic sheep will we do whatever the business shepherds tell us, no matter how bad we are treated? I am talking from firsthand interaction here.
Managing Your Business When One Client Takes Alot of Your Time
How often has your schedule been thrown out of whack because of a client's needs?I try to live by the 80/20 rule: working from my home office 80% of the time and working onsite with clients 20% of the time. But, the past week has been the exact opposite.
Your Actions Tell Your Clients How You Expect To Be Treated
There is a widely accepted principle of human behavior that goes something like this. "Your actions tell the world how you expect to be treated.
Finding Out Why a Potential Customer is Calling On You
Our challenge as the business owner/sales person answering the telephone, is to build rapport with the caller, quickly and easily.In most cases, the caller has been told something about you and your product or service.
Difficult Customers - Theres No Such Thing
A couple of years ago I had a call from a Customer ServiceManager working in the paper industry. He wanted me to run aseminar for his team, on "How to Deal with DifficultCustomers".
Boomerang Customers- What You Might NOT Think Brings Them Back!
With all of the calendars and PDA's and lists I make I recently did a really dumb thing. I forgot my best friend's birthday and her anniversary.
Over Delivering Provides Big Results
Over promising is a problem only when you under deliver. There are a number of ways that you can overdeliver to your customers or prospects, and as a result create a win-win situation for you both.
Dont Work with Jerks: How to Recognize a Difficult Client Early
Five minutes into the call I knew this client was going to make my life miserable. The problem was, I already said "Yes.
Cheap To Keep
You've heard it all before when it comes to stats about customer retention. Acquiring a customer costs five to 10 times more than retaining one.
What Exactly is Customer Relationship Management?
The defintion of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) that I favor is "CRM is the business strategy that aims to understand, anticipate, manage and personalize the needs of an organization's current and potential customers"From this we can learn that CRM is more than just a piece of software; CRM is a business strategy, one that puts the customer at the heart of the business."That's nothing new" I hear you say, and you would be right.