Restaurant Scheduling for Success
- Excerpt from Richard Saporito's latest e-book "How to Improve Dining Room Service" This Tip will Help Maintain the Staff Schedule Keeping the Dining Room Service Staff Tight and Content which is Essential for Pleasing Paying Guests. Staff scheduling is closely tied to dining room customer service and crucial for keeping your staff tight, happy and well connected. In every way, a balance must be achieved by matching the dining room service labor needs to forecasted business. There should be a system whereby the staff shift availability days can be communicated in writing to the person who makes up the schedule. A simple staff shift availability sign-up sheet posted conspicuously will do. Each staff member should work a balanced amount of shifts throughout the week. If the schedule maker is burning out staff members with extra shifts or scheduling too many staff members to work only 1 or 2 shifts, it will subtract from customer service. Usually, a restaurant will get more efficiency from staff members working 3, 4, or more shifts per week rather than only 1 or 2 shifts per week. Though at times, one may have to bend this guideline to keep the work schedule filled, but it should be kept to a minimum. Constant communication with the staff while staying abreast of their available work shifts will facilitate the scheduling process immensely. The person who makes the schedule should be highly aware of the projected business in the restaurant. The schedule should contain the correct amount of labor needed to provide a proper level of service for each work shift. Seasonal aspects, (e.g. busy holidays/slow summers), special occasions, private parties etc. must be figured into the schedule. Any outside activity that may affect business in the restaurant such as food festivals, parades etc. needs to be taken into account. If there are separate dining rooms, the busy times must be properly forecasted for each room especially if one dining room is more popular such as showing off a special type of décor or providing entertainment on certain nights. If there is outdoor seating, the weather should be watched for it can change quickly. Forecasting helps to schedule the correct amount of staff with the perfect balance always being sought. If there is light scheduling on a day that gets very busy, the dining room customer service will be slow and inefficient --affecting sales and reputation. On the contrary, if there is heavy scheduling on light business days, it will become frustrating for waitstaff will be working very few tables while draining the payroll. Generally, the schedule should start Sunday; therefore it needs to be posted by Thurs. or Fri. of the previous week. Excel spreadsheet formats are great for scheduling organization. The schedule should be posted in an easily viewable location with enough copies available for all staff. Staff phone lists should be printed, copied and made readily available to all. This improves communication especially for work shift substitutions. This leads to the substitution process for staff work shifts. There needs to be a Substitution Book readily available with blank spaces for names, upcoming dates and work shifts for the next 1 to 2 months. If a substitution made, the information must be recorded with the date and shift time a.m/p.m. etc. It must be initialed by both parties involved in the substitution and finally initialed by a manager ensuring no mistakes in communication. A substitution mishap may result in a shift not being covered. Scheduling may look great for payroll cost control, but it must be remembered that dining room service staff are real people with real lives whose cheerful and efficient service is what restaurants are dependant upon. The schedule maker needs to be understanding towards the staff's schedule requests, but should not roll over and play dead (again, balance). It is impossible to please everyone 100% all of the time, but a proper scheduling balance will truly have a positive effect on restaurant dining room customer service and staff. *** It is better for a manager or service consultant to handle the schedule at the initial phases of a new operation and should be monitored by a second or third person especially if the restaurant has just opened. Some mature restaurants may let a senior member of the service staff handle the schedule because there is better communiqué' with schedule concerns. Please use whichever system works best for the establishment for the staff schedule is a strong part of customer service and should not be taken lightly. Topserve Inc. is a Restaurant Service Consulting and Waiter Training Company. Richard Saporito, founder, has over 25yrs. of restaurant service experience in many large, diverse and profitable establishments. Since the age of 15, he has worked in more than 20 New York City restaurants and uses this past successful experience to help restaurants achieve their desired customer service goals-understanding it may be the difference between success and failure. Richard Saporito, President, Topserve Inc. http://www.topserveconsulting.com
info@topserveconsulting.com
888-276-4808
Related News
|
 |
|
|
RELATED ARTICLES
Loyalty Programs May Keep Customers Coming Back ? But First You?ve Got to Earn their Trust
Remember trading stamps? If you're over 40, chances are you will. Every time you shopped at a participating grocery store or gas station they gave you stamps to paste into a book. When you'd accumulated enough stamps, you could cash them in for "free" gifts.
Write a Business Thank-You Note
Have you seen that thing on TV where the gal tells
the nerd she wonders why he never asked her to
marry him and he stumbles and says "Thank You" and
she turns to butter?
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. Aren't you tired of having to talk to machines and sit waiting in queues that may not even really exist, while horrible music repeats itself over and over for eternity? How about having to talk to person after person as they try to find someone else who 'can' do the task that you need done? What about the machine that tells you to speak into the phone but can never properly interpret what you are saying? Or pushing buttons, how many numbers have you had to push before finally being told that the section you are looking for is vacant? Vacant, how about the humans you do finally get in contact with but for some strange reason know less about their job than you do?
Putting The Serve Back Into Customer Service
Good service is easy to spot and hard-to-find. Mediocre service
occasionally stands out but only because it's the cream-of-the-crap.
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.
Five Tips to Calm Cranky Customers
1. Tis the Season
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. You think this is a joke? Recent research shows that something like 60% of businesspeople place more importance on what they will get from a transaction than on what their customers will benefit.
You Bever Know Who Youre Serving
You Never Know Who You're Serving when customers turn irate.
Whatever Happened To Customer Service?
Do you remember the last time you went into a shop and the person 'serving' raced over to you, greeted you with a lovely smile, heaps of enthusiasm and said, "Welcome to our store, what can I help you with today?" And then listened attentively to what you had to say?
Adjustment DENIED
It's just a simple thing ? I bought a new set of shelves for my office. It wasn't a real problem, but when I got the shelves home, I found dents on the front of the shelves where the package had been leaned up on some other object, the shelves had been removed from the original box and put into another box. The dents didn't affect the way the shelves worked, but it did affect the way they looked. Normally, I might have overlooked the problem, and just used them anyway, but I felt I had paid full price for the shelves and deserved a discounted price, so I mentioned it to the store manager the next time I was in the store.
Reducing Customer Resistance to Your Product or Service
Resistance has to do with putting up blocks that prevent us from doing, being, or accomplishing what we want for our business. There are many reasons for feeling resistance including fear of new things or change, fear of failure or success or even fear of not being perfect.
What Every Employee Should Know About How to Prevent Customer Service Conflicts
There are five techniques that have been proven to be effective in resolving, minimizing, and preventing conflicts. And by conflicts I am referring to any of the following that may take place between two or more people: misunderstanding, miscommunications, arguments, disagreements, mixed messages, fighting, etc.
Clients... and 38 ways to communicate with them
As Alan Weiss (guru to the savvy consultant) says:
Who Says the Customer is Always Right?
We all know the old adage, "The Customer is Always Right." If you are an online business owner or offline for that matter, you are on both sides of the subject almost everyday.
Why You Should Always Honour Your Guarantees - Even When The Customer Is In The Wrong
The Reason Why Direct Internet Marketers Have To Work So Hard To Earn Our Trust
Sorry, No Customer Service After 4:00 P.M.
A few months ago, I wrote about ingenious styles of customer service that every business should know about, mostly because their employees were inflicting them on their customers.
Leverage Customer Capital First
If you're still dreaming about raising outside capital for your business before you have any paying customers, I've got a nice big bucket of ice water to throw on you. Wake up! The cold reality is that investors aren't interested in your business idea unless you can demonstrate that you've got customers who are actually willing to buy. Before you try raising outside capital, you should focus on building your Customer Capital.
How To Build Stellar Client Relationships
Your opportunity to build a stellar client relationship starts with managing the gap between your perception of how things are going and your client's.
Revealed ? A Simple Formula For Success! Exceeding Expectations
Delight = Customer Expectation plus 1. This was the simple formula for delighting your customers that Ken Blanchard informed us of in his book "Raving Fans"
4 Customer Service Mistakes Companies Should Avoid Making
1) Being placed on hold endlessly. Don't you just love it when you call a company and they place you on hold, leaving you to listen to their latest on-hold, recorded sales pitch, over and over again. Would you think it normal business practice for a retail store clerk to ask you to "wait a minute" while they disappeared into the back of the store for ten, fifteen, thirty minutes or longer? People do things over the phone that they would never do in person. It's bad business either way to leave a customer hanging without at least coming back to let the customer know how much longer they'll be holding.
|
