As the statistics say, in 2014 the total number of establishments in the F&B sector was 6,871, which increased to 7,229 in 2015 and further grew to 7,679 in 2016. This shows that competition is extremely high in the Singapore restaurant industry, and this makes it imperative for your restaurant to walk that extra mile to linger in your customer’s mind. Apart from being economically reasonable, one thing that tends to attract the customer’s attention is stellar restaurant service. And this is precisely what we will be talking in this article.
We will give you some handy tips, which if implemented keenly can make your restaurant best at the restaurant service in the Singapore market.
Maintaining quality and consistency of food, doing justice to the theme of the restaurant, providing quick and efficient service, maintaining optimum restaurant service standards are some of the primary things that you should have in place if you want to deliver a great restaurant service.
Since keeping your customer happy should be one of your primary concerns, you should strive hard to maintain an optimum level of customer service at your restaurant that will help you encourage repeat customers.
Build A Band Of Loyal Customers With These Restaurant Service Tips
Every restaurant in Singapore dreams of building a large band of loyal customers and having a great restaurant service will take you a step closer to achieving that dream of yours. While there may be several things that you might be doing to improve your restaurant service but you might be failing to acquire the desired results. Here we will point out the best restaurants service tips, that you can implement right away, which will bolster your overall sales exponentially.
1. Maintain Quality and Consistency of Food
Customers visit your restaurant for food, and unless your food is on point, it will be extremely hard for you to retain your customers. While providing good and tasty food to your customers is important, it is more important to maintain consistency and serve your customers, in the same manner, every time they visit you. Here comes the importance of consistency.
2. Train Staff Well
While you may think that since cooking is a manual task, there might be manual mistakes at times, which is only normal. However, your customers would come to you with an expectation, especially the repeat ones, and they would want to relive the same experience which they had the first time they visited you. Disappointing such customers will take you a step closer to losing them.
Hence, train your staff in effective ways to instill in them the techniques of portion control, and the way a dish needs to be prepared or presented. Organize comprehensive training sessions and provide them with a handy manual about the portion control.
3. Leverage Technology to Ensure Consistency
You can avoid inconsistency in food if you take refuge in a restaurant POS that comes with a recipe management feature. This will automate the entire cooking process and will leave hardly any scope of making faulty dishes. All you need to do is ask your head chef to create a detailed recipe of all the dishes on the menu and upload it in the recipe management on the POS.
The recipe should include a detailed description of all the ingredients used to prepare and present the dish, their quantity, the process of cooking, the temperature at which the dish needs to be prepared, and the way it needs to be presented. When such a detailed description is available all your chefs need to do is follow the recipe diligently. Not only will it help you to reduce your kitchen waste generation, which ultimately will reduce your food cost, but it will also help you maintain consistency and in turn help you deliver a stellar restaurant service.
While having recipe management is important when running a standalone outlet, its importance increases tenfolds when you are running a restaurant chain business. This is because maintaining consistency in taste and quality becomes all the more difficult across all the outlets. However, in the large chain restaurant business, it is extremely important to maintain consistency, since that will help you create your brand credibility.
4. Focus On Vendor Management
Procuring the raw materials from the same vendors will ensure the same quality of the raw materials. In addition to this, it will also help you build goodwill with your vendors, which will, in turn, ensure expected prices of raw materials, credit rates, proper quality check, and timely delivery. An efficient restaurant POS system that comes with a vendor management feature will help you manage multiple vendors from one central panel, and hence you will be able to manage all your vendors remotely.
If you don’t have a POS that comes with robust features that will help you maintain consistency in food, then what are you waiting for? Get one on board and see how it brings consistency in your restaurant business, which will be extremely pleasing for your customers.
5. Do Justice To The Theme Of The Restaurant
When starting a restaurant, you must have thought for a theme or a concept of the restaurant, and accordingly, have come up with a stellar restaurant name. Now when a customer comes across your restaurant on any of the restaurant review sites and decides to drop by, only to find out that your decor, interiors or the menu have nothing in sync with the theme of the restaurant, they will be highly disappointed. In these situations, it will become nearly impossible for you to retain the customers.
One of the primary ways to improve the restaurant service is by rightly claiming what you have in offer. Simply do not stop at naming the restaurant as per the theme, make the decor, the ambiance, the music, the cuisine you offer, the menu and the names of the menu items in sync with the theme of the restaurant.
Doing so, you will be able to avoid disappointing your customers, who might visit your restaurant with a preconceived notion, only to find out that you are not living up to the theme you claimed to offer to them.
6. Accelerate the Table Turnover Time
No customer like it when they have to wait for long in the queue to reserve and get a table, then to place the order and get the dishes served and finally to get the check at the end of the meal. Many a time, seeing a long queue a customer may even plan to visit some other restaurant. Any such situation is very harmful to your restaurant, since it may lead to you losing some potential loyal customer.
To avoid any such situations, you need to optimize your table turnover time. This is essentially the time required to serve the table, and increasing the table turnover time means, you will be able to serve more table. You can do this, by leveraging a stellar restaurant POS.
A robust restaurant technology comes with features like automatic KOT generation process, instant billing, tablet ordering, and queue management feature. Features like these will accelerate the process exponentially, for example, queue management will help customers reserve tables well in advance, and this will also help you gauge the footfall that will be receiving in a particular day and hence take appropriate steps like calling in more staff that will help you increase your table turnover time.
Having these in place will help you increase your table turnover time which, in turn, will help you increase your restaurant service to a great extent.
7. Maintain Set Service Standards
Customers love consistency. Hence make sure that you maintain consistency not only in terms of food but also when it comes to service standards. As a restaurant owner, it is your duty to set the standards to make sure that all your restaurant staff follows and performs their roles diligently.
You can create restaurant management checklists for all your restaurant staff and ask your manager to check if it is being followed by the staff on a daily basis. This is because, no matter how an exceptional service you deliver, chances are your staff might forget to do something or the other. To avoid any such situations laying out certain set restaurant service standards will come handy. The set rules will help the entire restaurant staff to follow the same protocol and deliver the same level of restaurant service at all times.
Making clear checklists will also help you in training your restaurant staff in an effective manner, which will help you in retaining them. Considering that there is a severe shortage of trained labor in the Singapore food industry, it becomes important for you to hire and to train your staff well that will help you in retaining your staff. In addition, well-trained staff will be in tune with your restaurant norms and hence will deliver stellar restaurant service.
8. Taking Feedback
Taking feedback from the customers is exceptionally important to understand their perception of your restaurant service. Hence, instead of letting them go and review you on the restaurant review sites, you can try and get their feedback on the floor of the restaurant itself.
This will be a double-edged sword. While you can stop unhappy customers from taking to social media and posting negative reviews, you can also try and compensate by providing them with a complimentary dish, or some discount which they can avail on their next visit. This will encourage your customer retention efforts.
In addition, customers love it when their feedback is heard and are given due attention. You can take their feedback either on a form or automate the process through a feedback app, which when integrated with your restaurant POS will help you create a comprehensive CRM database. Since your primary goal should be to satisfy the customers, take their feedback into consideration and make appropriate changes that will further bolster your operations and hence help you deliver a stellar restaurant service.
Additionally, use this Customer Service Checklist that would help you deliver a great guest experience to your customers.
Following the above-mentioned processes, you can very effectively ace the mantra of making your restaurant service one of the best in the Singapore restaurant industry sector. Hence, what are you waiting for, implement these tips immediately and see how it helps you increase your customer retention capabilities by leaps and bounds.
