Communication with the client. The sphere of public catering is the sphere of rendering services. And this means that the main task of its employees is to make guests happy at the time that they are with them. The optimal way to increase sales is to achieve a more frequent visit by customers to the restaurant. Here your primary task is to satisfy visitors, win their favor and earn their loyalty, and not try to raise the average amount of a check.

Understanding Customer Needs. The main task in the catering industry is to satisfy the visitor’s needs. If your guests do not enjoy visiting the restaurant, everything else does not matter. Studies have also shown that customer dissatisfaction increases significantly only 10 minutes after the average service time has passed. However, this “rule of 10 minutes” does not work when the client waits for an aperitif or dessert. At the very beginning and at the end of the meal, customers, as practice confirms, are less tolerant of delays. So, service time is one of the areas where you could exceed customer expectations.

Warning. Try to do everything sincerely, from the heart, for pleasure and for the benefit of your client. People easily recognize when they are treated formally, mechanically, or when they are experiencing some new technique. At best, most clients will regard this as an indifferent, cold attitude towards them, and at worst – will perceive as a personal insult. However, in any case, your institution will not add credibility and honor. Therefore, if something does not work for you and you can not talently express immeasurable joy in relation to your customers, then do not try. On the other hand, hospitality is a human relationship. It is determined by how you apply the elements of service in practice and, in addition, how much your customers feel your care and attention to them. Even irreproachable from the technical point of view, the service will not deliver complete satisfaction to customers if they do not feel sincerity and your interest in the desire to give them pleasure and pleasure.

See the interlocutor in the eye. Nothing warms the soul like a smile. Teach your staff to contact each new visitor with a direct look and a wide open smile.

Go to meet the guests who came. Hospitality directly depends on your ability to establish personal relationships with customers. And to make this easier, you should treat guests as individuals, not as customers. Take for the rule: those who welcome your guests at the entrance, should go out to meet them from behind the counter. It is best to get rid of all these racks altogether. The prologue to eating in a restaurant should be the smile of one of the attendants when meeting visitors when they enter the restaurant. This does not require that the head waiter be chained to the front door. Simply someone should always know what is happening at the entrance, and go to the newly arrived guests, as soon as they appear in the doors of the restaurant.

Give attention to newly arrived guests in the first 30 seconds. Remember, you have about 30 seconds from the moment people entered the restaurant, to smile at them and let them know that their arrival did not go unnoticed. If you are busy at this point in some kind of business that you can not postpone, try to complete it quickly and engage the guests. If people feel their importance from the moment they enter the restaurant, they will spend time with you in a more upbeat mood and good spirits.

Pronounce the client’s name more often. Among the things that are extremely pleasant to people, the sound of their own name is far from the last. In a casual manner, learn the names of your guests and call them by name at any opportunity during their meal. The maitre d’hotel is easier to find out the names of customers by looking at the table order list or by politely asking about it at the moment when he seats the guests at the table. Do not consider it shameful to call them a warning gentleman such or such a mistress, unless they themselves offer you to be less formal.

The basic principles of “word of mouth”

This section is devoted to a number of aspects that you can use to deliver your customers more pleasant moments, which they will happily recall and talk about. Our task is to help you understand the basic principles of the formation of oral feedback, as well as how they work and support client marketing in general.

The first principle: people can not be your customers if they do not think about you! The purpose of the oral feedback program is to get customers to speak positively about you. When you become the subject of an enthusiastic story of your client, the narrator and the people with whom he talks can have a desire to visit you again. Whenever a visitor thinks and speaks about you, your chances of a second visit increase. Agree, it is fair to believe that if the thoughts of your restaurant never come to your client’s mind, then it will hardly ever appear to you.

The second principle: there are no oral reviews, if there is nothing to talk about. If you want people to talk about your restaurant nice things for you, then there must be something that they can talk about. In other words, you need to educate your clients to formulate the reasons why they come to you.

The third (main) principle: the oral testimonies themselves will not appear. Although it is possible that people will talk about your restaurant well and maybe even enthusiastically without any visible effort on your part. However, oral feedback is a sales creation tool with such a powerful potential that it is simply a great sin to leave it at the mercy of the occasion. If you want people to talk about you, you need to take responsibility for it. You need to be sure that you give the clients good enough reasons, which you can and should talk about. You need to ensure that they are more actively involved in your restaurant business. Earn their trust, tell them more about things they do not know, and always do something about what they would like to tell friends and family members.

The fourth principle: oral feedback depends on the signs of difference between your restaurant and others. If you are not able to create a pronounced difference from your competitors, then people will still have the opportunity to talk about you. But they can hardly explain intelligibly why they continue to go to your restaurant, not to some other one. People need an explanation of the reasons why they do so, and not otherwise, prefer this, and not that. Therefore, creating differences is another important aspect of this work. The last argument in favor of an active program for the formation of oral feedback is as follows. If you are not able to create differences, you must seriously compete in the price field. The concept of creating differences is very important in the public catering system.