I am a consultant to restaurants and businesses who want to have a strong service program. I write training manuals, I build operational systems that support strong performance, hire and train great teams, and coach people on how to engage guests (and increase sales).
But most importantly, I’m in the business of teaching people the how and why of selling happy.
Plenty of restaurants have figured out the process of making great tasting cakes, a sandwich, latte, or fried egg. But what many restaurant owners forget to spend time on is how they deliver their products to their guests.
Here’s the thing, businesses that thrive in today’s connection economy need to do more than just deliver high-quality products that people need or want. Successful businesses with a dedicated fan base are ones that go out of their way to delight their customers. Continue reading “Service 101: Selling Happy”
Want to know why great customer service is hard to find? Because it requires an investment of time, money, and planning.
We’re fast to complain about the shortcomings of businesses who fail to give great service — just read Yelp and you’ll see all sorts of disappointments in the area of customer service — but are we actually willing do something about it?
We all may hope a culture of appreciation and helpfulness was built into every business exchange, but desire doesn’t make it so. Money and intention do.
So if you want great customer service, you need to start investing in it.
Investing in Hospitality
Kindness and generosity of spirit may be inherent for some, but natural empathy and kindness is a trait that requires cultivation in most people.
The average Jane and Joe don’t spend their days thinking up ways to relate to another person’s pain. The hourly worker isn’t empowered to dedicate time to creatively problem solve a solution that will make a stranger feel better about themselves and the product they just purchased. In truth, most consumers and employers want fast and efficient help that comes at a low price. They expect nicety and warmth will be offered to them gratis.
The sad truth is, we live in a world where we expect altruism and compassion but we don’t cultivate these traits in our institutions. Schools don’t require Mindfulness and Compassion 101. The workplace isn’t where you take classes on empathy. Our government doesn’t require our public servants to be trained in radical hospitality. I mean, who can afford such frivolities!?
And yet, how is it we expect people to be giving and kind to one another in our daily exchanges, if we don’t invest time in speaking about such things?
If you want to grow employees or people who treat others with warmth and compassion, we have to take the time to teach such traits.
And guess what, folks. Time = money.
Invest in hospitality
Time = Money
We can wish all day long that kindness and compassion were inherent traits that were taught in homes and in the business world, but–on average–they aren’t.
As a people, we would rather spend money on software training, speed, and efficiency than traits like big-heartedness and unselfishness. Check out the job postings on most company websites and you are not going to find empathy and benevolence listed under job requirements.
To get great customer service we have to build meaning into our work and begin growing gentleness and hospitality within us.
A Call to Action
Businesses: If your business collects complaints about customer service or you own or work at a restaurant that’s plagued with flaming Yelp reviews, I suggest you think about investing more time into building a culture of hospitality. If you don’t know where to start, I suggest you seek outside help (there are great books and people like me who specialize in teaching such things).
Consumers: If you find yourself consistently disappointed with the service you get at restaurants, banks, retail stores, and daily business exchanges–I have a revolutionary suggestion for you: start investing time and money into supporting the businesses that treat you well and learning how to be kinder to yourself and others.
If you want to be treated well or have employees treat customers with kindness and respect–we have to be willing to invest in it. How will you start investing?
We live in a time when new is a marker of cool. In Los Angeles, the newest restaurant on the block often trumps well established culinary landmarks–not necessarily because of the quality, but for the newness of the food and the scene. The fickle dining public swarm to what’s new and eat through the menu until they have reached overload and the place becomes “played out”.
The rush to stay current often comes at a cost, since most trend-seeking customers have very little patience for growing pains. Even well-respected chefs who bring along with them their own built in audience, require time and an extreme amount of effort to work out the kinks. Opening a restaurant is hard. Going to a new restaurant is challenging. Customers and restaurateurs need to keep an open mind in the first six months of business.
Take for example a restaurant opening I was a part of a number of years ago before I was a consultant. The city of Los Angeles buzzed with excitement as a well-regarded chef’s prepared to open her third restaurant. The restaurant was speculated about in the city’s gossip rag (Eater LA) more than a year before opening.
Behind the scenes, a famous designer and architect was brought in to create a lush dining room from the shell of a worn out culinary landmark. The chef created new dishes and groomed hungry new cooks for lead positions. Management staff worked tirelessly day and night to hire a great staff, stock the shelves with the best china, flatware, sparkling crystal, and bottles of the best liquor and wine. Service staff trained for weeks on the culinary history of particular dishes, memorized detailed information on wines from around the world, and studied traditions of food regions in Europe.
As opening day approached, LA foodies speculated online about what the food would be like. High ranking Yelpers schemed how to snag a first night reservation so they could be the first to review the restaurant. Curious neighbors peered in through the curtained windows and pulled on locked doors.
The day the restaurant opened, men and women of all ages jammed the reservation lines. Fashionable movie stars and grown adults fabricated lies, elbowed their way to the front of the line, and dropped names in hopes to get the reservation they wanted from the host staff.
After months of non stop work, the team crossed their fingers and hoped that the night went as well as they hoped. The dining room was electric with anticipation as waiters in crisp white shirts delivered the chef’s newest dishes to the guests. Plates flew from the kitchen as the brigade in white worked against time, sharp knives, hot plates, and exhaustion.
Several hours later, when the last dessert left the kitchen, the chef joined the management team in the dining room to measure the energy level of the room. Guests scurried from their seats to congratulate the chef.
Professional diners–men and women who rarely cook for themselves at home and eat out several times a week–gushed with praise and sprinkled well-intentioned suggestions of where the restaurateur could improve. The customers were giddy with ideas: how to re-design of the restrooms, what level the music should be played at, suggestions on what direction to take the business in (catering! delivery! even more expansion!), how to cook a piece of meat, just how much sauce should be poured over a certain entree, the correct measurements on a particular cocktail, and just how many bottles of wine from a particularly popular vineyard in California should be purchased.
When the doors were locked and the music turned off, the chef swore under her breath.
No one can control how a diner responds to customer service
News flash: I’m not the boss of the world.
I know you know that. Most of the time I know that, too. The problem is, sometimes a tiny little piece of me really wants to believe I can control the way things go.
When a guest comes into our restaurant, I want them to love what we do and feel taken care of. To be honest, there’s a tiny piece of me that cross-my-fingers hopes that all the hard work everyone puts into our food and service will somehow change someone’s life.
But every day, I have to remind myself that how things work out in this world is not up to me.
How people perceive the things is entirely up to them. No matter how hard I try, I can’t sway the perceptions of others with my passion, commitment, and East coast willpower. I’m an Aries (read: ram mentality) and the first born of a Massachusetts family, so believe me when I tell you I’ve been trying to exert my will on everyone and everything for years.
The problem with my earnest, heart-felt customer service is that sometimes it backspins. It can hit customers the wrong way. In my earnestness to help I may come across as annoying, or worse, bossy. I may tell a guest something that looks and feels like a YES–but it may come across as a giant NO to them. There are days when my desire to get things right goes awry and the people I work with end up feeling more stomped on then helped.
Being the boss of me
It wasn’t until rather recently that I began to understand that my desire to help and my need to control outcomes was making me–and sometimes the people around me–very unhappy. When people didn’t understand what I was doing for them or to them, I got hurt, defensive, and overbearing. I tried harder to make people understand that my way was the best way rather than try to understand where they were coming from.
There were days when I felt like I was losing the battle in giving great service. I knew something was off. I knew I needed to change the way I did things.
For me, the first step in giving up control is having faith that everything will work out, as it should. I’m learning that if I want to be happy in my life and in my work, I have to accept the results as they come. And boy, is that a hard one.
Luckily, I have a lot of great people around me who are helping me get to a place of acceptance and surrender. These people–my committee, I like to call them–coach me to look at how I can work on myself and leave all the people, places, and things around me alone.
I have to stop making my will to get the things I want the largest factor in the equation of service. In order to be of service to others, my will can’t be bigger than other peoples’. I have to turn the greater than symbol towards love and compassion and put myself on the small side.
So I may or may not be able to make you happy when you come into my restaurant or you come to this website to read what I have to say. The thing I have to keep reminding myself is that As It Should doesn’t always look like How I Want. Everybody hates bad customer service. But customer service isn’t as pretty when it’s delivered like a sledge hammer.
“We should realize that this event [of eating and being fed, is a ritual]…The whole thing of compassion comes in there. What helped me was waking up and thinking of my penny catechism: “to know, to love, to serve God.” I don’t think of God as up there. I think of God as right here in whatever I’m knowing and loving and serving…”
Walk into the 24-seat restaurant I work in and within just seconds you’ll have the entire place sized up: cement walls, high ceilings, a pastry counter, an open kitchen, two tables that hold eight people, and one counter that seats another eight guests. That’s it. Often, we have a line of people that spills out onto the sidewalk of Wilshire Boulevard.
“Where’s the rest of the place?” is a common refrain I hear several times a day. Confused diners scan the room for a side dining area with a hidden cache of tables with extra seating. But our tiny foot print with two tables is all we have. So we have to get creative–which is why every seat in the restaurant is part of the communal seating plan.
Every once in a while, there’s a lull in service and there are plenty of seats to be had. During those quiet times guests seat themselves. Men and women leisurely toss jackets and bags over empty chairs, splay their newspapers across the marble tabletops, and order their meal without any idea that soon—when the glittering-white daylight of Santa Monica fades—a swarm of hungry customers will arrive hungry for food and a piece of what was once their personal space.
The transition between the quiet and busy times is where things tend to get a little sticky. When the number of guests waiting to be seated reach more than four people, the energy in the room shifts. You can feel the tension, as the people waiting begin to covet the single, empty chairs that separate the seated diners. It’s during these moments when the guests who are waiting for a spot need a special kind of assistance. The diners need my help in asking people to share some available space with them.
This isn’t the easiest of challenges a restaurant manager can face. Asking guests to do something for you requires a lot of diplomacy and humility, and even if you bring a lot of kindness to the table it still might not go well. It’s in these awkward moments outside the realm of our comfort zone, however, that magic sometimes happens. Continue reading “Service 101: Compassion in the Dining Room”
Restaurant people like me need to know who our customers are and what they want and must ensure that our restaurant delivers a high quality product (great tasting food, wonderful atmosphere, and generous service) in a timely fashion. But what makes some restaurants more successful than others is the ability to define and deliver on the unspoken (or hinted at) expectations of customers. A lot of restaurant leaders call this part of our job managing expectations, but really what that means is that we are in the business of reading customers’ minds.
Customers may say they want a salad, but what they really desire is something much more complicated.
When I hear, “Don’t you have a simple salad with chicken?” I quickly run an internal algorythm (based on years of waiting tables and managing) that tells me what customers who typically ask this question want but don’t ask for. perhaps the customer really wants a simple green salad with the dressing on the side and a large portion of inexpensive, poached chicken put on top. The customer expects this salad to cost less than $12-14. The customer may like a smile from the waiter but may be opposed to any chit-chat. The customer may also be of the mindset that any white wine will do, so long as it comes in a big glass and costs less than $10. A customer who asks this question tends not to be adventurous and likes to stay in their comfort zone. Avoid selling specials to the guest, especially if there is an item on the dish that the customer has never heard of before (they will most likely hate the dish).
If you’re a simple salad with chicken person, just know that not everyone insists that every restaurant have chickens poaching in the back kitchen for moments such as this. I don’t mean this in an offensive way, I just mean to say that what your expectation is of a restaurant is much different than the I want a basket of bread and olive oil and balsamic vinegar customer, or the what’s the most popular thing on your menu person.
Expectations may seem like a clear goal that everyone should know, but the fact is, what we think most people should do is not a universal belief system. Expectations are just an individual’s strong personal belief that something specific will happen in the future. None of us know for sure what other people want, we just know what we expect and make guesses from there. Just ask any guy what women expect on a first and second date and you’ll get a whole range of answers. Because here’s the thing–unless the person holding the expectation speaks what they want aloud, no one will ever know for certain the exactitudes of their desires.
I like to joke that I’m honing my psychic powers while I work in restaurants, but honestly it’s true. That’s exactly what I’m doing. I’m constantly reading the energy and body language of my guests and gathering clues about what’s really going on below the surface.
What do you (really) want?
Let’s talk about general expectations people have of restaurants. For some people, hand picked heirloom tomatoes and small batch burrata mean more flavor. For other people, just the mention of the word heirloom sets their skin crawling and their BS meter on high alert. One guest may like hearing specials recited at their table while another customer may find that kind of thing obtrusive and verging on deceptive. Depending on the expectations, one restaurant could get a five star Yelp review for the same exact experience that garnered a one star review from another.
Getting clear on expectations
If you know what specifically makes you happy at a restaurant then it’s very easy to identify what rubs you the wrong way. Or what it looks like when something goes terribly wrong at your table. “Waiter, there is a fly in my soup,” you may say. Or perhaps you are compelled to call over a manager because your waiter seems to have forgotten you and your order. Regardless of what specifically the restaurant did to fail your expectations, how clearly you can express those shortcomings to the person offering to make the situation better will get you so much closer to a resolution.
Sometimes restaurant managers know how to do the right thing and are empowered to go and get it done. Sometimes they just don’t. In all my years in restaurants, I have seen plenty of mistakes happen. I do my best to sincerely apologize, offer a solution, and go a little bit farther for the guest to ensure I can turn the guest’s experience around.
Sometimes dessert is enough to turn a bitter experience into something sweet
You wouldn’t believe half the stuff I’ve done trying to win guests back. I apologize, stay away from excuses, take items of the check, and then do whatever I can to connect to the guest. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. Along the way of managing expectations, I’ve seen miraculous things happen. In the process of being sincere and generous of spirit, I’ve seen smiles come from the unhappiest of people. I’ve gotten hugs of gratitude. I’ve even minted customers for life. But sometimes, no matter what I do or how much radical hospitality I give, I can not win back a guest. It’s as if that small mistake of a forgotten side dish or a loud song on the sound system were offensive acts perpetrated against these hurt individuals. It is as if I personally attacked them, when in reality all that happened was that someone pressed the wrong button in the computer or failed to get a dish to the table in a timely fashion.
But it doesn’t matter what happened when things go wrong. What matters most to you, the unhappy customer, is what is done to fix the situation. Right?
But what about you? What sort of responsibility does the customer hold? If you have high expectations but can not voice what it is you expect, or you can not accept any resolution that’s offered to you, do you hold any responsibility for your unhappiness?
How open are you to getting good service?
I do not, in any way, mean to lessen the responsibility of the restaurant in the equation of making customers happy. No way. But what I am supposing is that in every hundred customers who have their expectations met, there are a small percentage of people who will never be happy with any business (or personal) exchange, no matter how hard the business tries to make things better. I mention this because I hope that I might some day one of these posts might help one person realize that if they can never find happiness in any business exchange, maybe it might be time to look at working on the one constant in the equation.
High Expectations of Service
But here’s the thing about expectations–we all have them. How we deal with our expectations and how willing we are to be flexible with what is given to us is an important piece in our long term happiness. If we don’t get exactly what we want, do we experience profound disappointment? If we find people are consistently letting us down do we get angry, sad, resentful, or spring into action to make a change in our priorities? Just how far are we willing to go to be happy? Are we willing to be open to new experiences? Or do we only want things our way?
“Awareness is the birthplace of possibility. Everything you want to achieve begins here.”–Deepak Chopra
As a Service Coach, I observe restaurant teams in action and coach them how to win the game of earning customers for life. I take groups of service professionals from being average–and sometimes minor–players to being highly coveted members of an award-winning team. I help shape natural talent into something special.
Most owners understand the basic business proposition of giving their customers a consistent product. But what many people in business fail to identify and grow in their staff is the importance of making customers feel as if their needs were exceeded. Again and again and again. Businesses that take the time to help their staff be aware, listen, and foster an intuitive sense about what customers want, tend to be the winners in the game of making customers for life.
I am lucky to be a restaurant consultant who has the great fortune of working with smart and insightful people who understand the value of hospitality. These visionary business owners see the long road ahead of them, recognize the need to invest in customer service programs, and bring me on to help improve their game. Like most great leaders, my clients understand the value of getting assistance to sure up their weaknesses–way before a weaknesses become a failure.
The first step in successful coaching starts with observing. I can tell a lot about a restaurant within the first few minutes of watching them in action. Give me a corner seat, a handful of minutes during a busy service, and I can give you an accurate assessment of a restaurant team’s potential, problems, and requirements.
Following my initial observations, I show clients what I’ve learned from watching their dining room. I offer them information on how keeping a constant eye on specific areas of their dining room can result in obtaining key information about their diners and how to better deliver what they need. Even in some of the best restaurants, leaders may fail to identify key areas for improvement. I notice dropped napkins while staff members walk over them. I identify neglected customers and lost sales opportunities where staff members walk past in a rush to get another task done. In some especially hurting businesses when owners can only see business losses, I may find unlocked beer coolers and liquor storage areas, menus with confusing descriptions, managers with lacking leadership skills, and dining rooms with a personality disorder.
Awareness may be something we’re born with. Our modern lives drain us of the impulse to stay aware. Lately, it seems, most Americans don’t seem all that comfortable with awareness.
