When you think of guest experience, it’s easy to focus on a helpful server, fast service or clean bathroom. What most people don’t realize is all these things (and so much more!) aren’t just skills that you have or you don’t. By taking advantage of things like custom company checklists, mobile training, predictive scheduling and automated orders, you can use technology to enhance the experience your guests receive.
Here are a few of the ways you can leverage technology to provide a better, more consistent experience across your brand.
1. Providing Prompt Service
No matter how good the food you serve is, if your guests are left waiting too long between arrival and order, refills, or end of the meal and the check, their experience can still be soured.
One way to help tackle this problem is to take advantage of the predictive scheduling tools offered in your restaurant management platform. Predictive scheduling pulls in historical trends based on day, time of year and weather to help ensure you aren’t over or understaffed and guests get great service every time.
2. Confident, Competent Employees
Having employees who don’t know your menu, how to greet new guests, proper portioning and more can all be detrimental to the experience in your restaurant. Often restaurant training consists of a spiral bound book and a few days job shadowing. But this quickly leads to information overload, and actually means employees onboard more slowly because they are reluctant to ask questions and look like they weren’t paying attention in those initial days.
Putting training documents online, so employees can access FAQs and common procedures on their phones allows employees to easily answer their own questions, reduces time burdens on your manager and other employees. It also means your employees feel better about their performance and enjoy work more, increasing retention rates.
3. Brand Consistency
While good training makes a world of difference, sometimes the challenge is making things as easy as possible for employees so they’re not taking shortcuts. One was to do that is with customized checklists on mobile.
Putting everything from HACCP requirements to store closing checks on mobile lists that have been customized for your business means you never have to worry about an employee forgetting a step, and you have a record of who approved what and when.
4. Optimized Inventory
Overordering means you just killed your margins for the week, underordering means you must have the dreaded conversation about a menu item that’s unavailable. With modern inventory and purchasing systems, you can get recommended orders based on current inventory levels and historical trends.
