Growing Your Hospitality Business: The Link Between Customer Service And Your WorkforceBy Marlowe Bennett

Having the right front line staff and management team is a good start. But when you’re planning to open more venues, maintaining or improving customer service standards is a delicate seesaw.

It’s a balance of leadership, manpower and strategic focus while stretching your management team to the limits.

The biggest risk – in addition to fit out costs and construction as you acquire new properties – is always going to be maintaining the high levels of service that are expected from your current customers. Expectations the public and your staff have come to be appreciative of.

Remember: No matter what, always think about the customer experience.

Opening a new venue can be a resource drain on management as they focus their attention on the next big plan. Moving some of your key personnel from other venues might be a good idea, but what about the guest experience in your current venues?

How are the customer service standards being managed and maintained? Can you honestly say that the process works and the public haven’t noticed anything different? Everyone is a critic these days, so it’s no longer acceptable to “just wing it.”

Opening a new venue could come in the form of acquiring a venue from another operator or you could be simply building your dream from scratch. Both of these situations present challenges that will most definitely involve people and culture.

If you acquire a venue, the idea is to retain any suitable staff, but what if the staff you inherit aren’t up to what you’re about to create?

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Opening a new venue should be an exciting time but it’s hard work and it requires commitment from everyone involved.

There are deadlines to meet and training to be conducted to ensure your concept is delivered perfectly, on budget and with minimal fallout or staff turnover.

The costs involved with opening teams is considerable, the pressure is high and the need to have the right people on board is critical.

Can you imagine investing your opening team budget on training only for this talent to walk out the door within the first two months? It happens.

Consider the time and effort you put into interviewing, onboarding, training and integrating these new employees. What does this add up to?

A quick way to find a figure is to start with adding up eight weeks worth of wages for your entire team, then add the costs of all the external training consultants you brought in, plus money you spent on advertising.

That’s quite a hefty number isn’t it?

If management is so bogged down in high level business needs, it’s likely that the recruitment process is left to last – if it’s been allocated time at all.

In addition to this, if it’s

not the most favourable task

of management, there’s risk of no love being

put into the process.

It all starts with finding the right person for the right job.

When it comes to maintaining or improving customer service standards, it all starts with recruitment and successfully identifying and onboarding the right person, not just any person.

From there, it’s ensuring that the management team have the ability to lead and inspire their workers.

In addition to that, management also need to communicate the stakeholders exact expectations of how they envisage the concept to be perceived by the public. This should be acknowledged, understood and even signed off and agreed on by any new starters from the very beginning.

Stop for a moment, and ask yourself what are the strengths of your management team? You hired them for a reason – what were those reasons?

Was it because of their strength in recruitment? Their proven history in strategies, in search and selection techniques or onboarding?

Chances are no.

More likely, it was because of their proven history in service delivery, their strength in customer service, managing teams and in running successful operations within a budget.

Allow them to focus time and energy on improving customer service standards in your existing establishments and successfully opening a new venue?

So what if, when preparing for growth or acquisitions of new venues, or simply on a day-to-day basis you could play to the strengths of your management team?

What if you could engage with a service that could allow you all of this?

And what if you could do all of this, whilst reducing the overall costs and limiting unplanned staff turnover?

Imagine a workday like that.

To learn more about how you can reduce overall costs, attract, engage and retain talent on an ongoing basis, and maintain or even improve customer service standards whilst opening a

new venue, download our free e-book ‘Effective Managers: Ways To Combat The Hospitality

Skills Shortage And Enhance Business Growth’

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