Hospitality businesses should focus on creating great guest experiences; delivered flawlessly.
Sadly many hospo businesses lose sight of this, at Über we refer to this failure as WTcF.. (Where’s The Customer Focus).
This failure delivered by guest-facing staff breaks the bond of trust between guest and staff, the human element of the delivered hospitality experience.
To know whether your business and staff are focused here’s an Uber checklist of questions you need to answer honestly:
1. Customers should be heard once!
A customer must never repeat his/her order, problem, frustration... the experience/service must be 100% right, done once!
2. Quality must be tested before a customer eats, drinks or experiences anything.
Winging it, iterating on the fly, is a recipe for failure. Guest offerings must be thoroughly battle and stress tested first!
3. A customer must never ask where’s their drink, meal or order.
Production, kitchen, customer service feedback systems are in place to ensure that this does not happen! If not then it’s time to refine the process, retrain, re-imagine every guest facing strategy.
4. A delivered drink, meal, service or product requires immediate feedback.
Getting immediate feedback protects against failure. Unattended feedback translates into potentially disgruntled guests.
5. Customer’s time, convenience and satisfaction must be valued.
The customer is the hero in your story. Actions and attentiveness create the guest outcomes.
6. Customers require respect, including the rude ones.
Team members must be taught how to deal with all situations. Even the rude customers deserve patience and need to be shown respect.
7. Never tell customers: how busy, full or short staffed you are.
Using any of these excuses is a massive failure, no one’s in business to be quiet? Never use language that communicates that you’re more important than your guest.
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