How is Your Customer Service Level?

American Express Global Customer Service Barometer. These findings demonstrate how important the customer experience is: 

93% of Americans say companies fail to exceed their expectations

55% walked away from an intended purchased because of a bad service experience

Americans tell approximately 15 people about positive experiences, up 67% from 9 last year but they also tell approximately 24 people about poor experiences, up 50% from 2011.

More than 1 in 3 respondents admitted to losing their temper with a service provider in the past twelve months.

According to the American Express survey, 79% of respondents suggested one of these four complaints led them to switch brands: 

Rudeness: An insensitive or unresponsive customer service representative, 33%

Passing the Buck: Being shuffled around with no resolution of the issue, 26%

The Waiting Game: Waiting too long to have an issue resolved, 10%

Being Boomeranged: Forced to continually follow up on an issue, 10%

How to be successful with a restaurant

The problem with all those food shows on TV, is that they make you think that to be successful in the restaurant industry you need good food. Unfortunately it is not about food, it is about a dining experience, and how you treat the guests. You first have to treat your employees well, so that they in turn treat the guests well. 

You do not build a successful restaurant with a great decor, and beautiful dishes, you build it by cultivating and nurturing relationships so people come back. There are well too many restaurants in every cities with great chefs. But if you want the guests to come back you have to deliver more than a flashy decor and great dishes, because every restaurant can do the same. But if you want the guests to come back you must deliver something nobody else does. Great relationships, care, and superior service. The rest is forgettable. Great human relationships are not forgettable, that is what you remember.

They Won't All Love You

No matter how hard you try, not all  customers are going to love you. We wish there is something we can do to win them all, but we can only have so many great friends, great co-workers, and one spouse only. Thus as you cannot get along with everyone in life because you have your personality, you will try to get along with most, but not everybody will see all your efforts, good intentions, hard work and dedication. Some will be hard to please, if not impossible.

We hate it our best efforts are misunderstood or unappreciated by the people who really would benefit from what we love to do. There are people who work very hard in your organization..We get frustrated when a competitor whose products or services are inferior to our own is chosen, or when a client leaves disappointed and post a bad review on about your company.

Life is not always fair. You are not always the cause of the problem. Some people are so miserable in life that they want everybody to be miserable. There is nothing you can do to please them and make them happy. They have chosen to be unhappy and want to bring down everybody with them. That is why not everybody is going to love you.

And that can make us be so frustrated. Just move on to the next person you can render happy and that will come back to you, because they appreciate your efforts.Do your best. Be true to yourself, your brand and your value proposition.Understand that and let them go.Simply put all your efforts on to those who will love you and along the way you'll make a lot of friends.

Why is Customer Service so Important

Are you forgettable?


Today I needed to do a smog test for my car. I went to a location. I asked the guy how much it was. He replied "$70". I said "The guy that sent me said it was $50". He replied "well asked him to pay the $20 difference". I asked how much it was in case I don't pass the test and I had to come back. He replied $30. So he wanted $100, he was not friendly, rude for sure. So I left and brought my business somewhere else. This guy will keep being miserable as he has NO CUSTOMER SERVICE SKILLS. 


To all of you business owners I wonder how many of you have hired someone for his/her exceptional customer service skills. I also wonder how much training and education you have given your employees, so they exceed during customer interactions. I highly doubt any of you have hired any of your employees on those MOST IMPORTANT SKILLS. Without the SUPERIOR CUSTOMER SERVICE, your business won't last for ever. There is no way you can compete with other businesses in your industry if your customer service is not SUPERIOR TO OTHERS. There is well too much competition, and people go online and check your rating. They compare your reviews to others in your industry.


Your employees who interact with customers all day long should be TRAINED TO DELIVER UNPARALLELED EXPERIENCE, so the customers REMEMBER your company's EXCELLENT CUSTOMER SERVICE. If you fail in that area, you will just be another business among many others in town. FORGETTABLE!


WHAT DIFFERENTIATES YOU FROM YOUR COMPETITION?


What is your UNIQUE SELLING PROPOSITION? How long do you think it will take future businesses to take over your clients, because you do not accentuate on your customer service delivery?


Andre Plessis
Restaurant & Hospitality Consultant

Tip Reporting For ALL Restaurant Owners

By definition, a tip is deemed a transaction that occurs directly from the "customer to the employee" and the management and ownership may NEVER  receive any part of that tip. Think about that: restaurant owners cannot derive any monetary benefit whatsoever from tips and are held responsible for handling all the reporting of tip income for all of their tipped employees. That often means incurring extra costs for bookkeeping and recordkeeping, as well as management oversight to make sure the reporting is airtight. Still, no matter what, they have to make sure it is accurate. Why? Because the first records an investigating agency will look for are your payroll records.

Employer Responsibilities

 

Largely in order to avoid in-house underreporting issues, employers and managers have some strict requirements when it comes to tip reporting. Employers must essentially do four things to make sure they are following the law and doing their jobs:

Receive tip reports.
Employers must receive a tip report from each employee for every payroll period (or more often if desired).
Withhold Income and FICA taxes.
They must withhold Income and FICA taxes from each employee’s paycheck and report each employee’s tips to the IRS³. Report all tips for the month no later than the 10th day of the month following the month the tips were received.
File Form 8027.
If the restaurant is considered a large business,* then they must also file Form 8027 with the IRS at the end of every year. This is a document that summarizes the restaurant’s charged sales, total sales, charged tips and total reported tips.
Allocate necessary wages.
If the total reported tips do not add up to eight percent of the total sales, then the restaurant must go through a tip allocation process. This means that a manager is required to retro-pay more wages to the servers who recorded too few tip earnings (below eight percent of their sales).⁴

Most Restaurant-Goers Rely on Online Reviews

In the digital age, finding a great meal is only a few clicks away. Food review sites and apps like Yelp and Foodspotting make eating out very easy for you. All you need is check online for a restaurant reviews.

Before setting foot outside, about 45% of consumers have already chosen where to eat with the help of an online dining guide. Online reviews are a huge decider of what’s for dinner, 57% of patrons rely on them.
Even more interesting is that despite the rise of online food directories such as Urbanspoon or Menupages, 41% of consumers still wine and dine at a particular restaurant after receiving a promotional email.
The National Restaurant Association drew up the infographic below showcasing how technology is changing the food industry. Plus, check out the kinds of technology consumers are expecting to see in restaurants.

What is your opinion?

Andre Plessis
Hospitality/restaurant Consultant
AP Consulting
tel: 310-266-9463

Social media is reinventing how business is done

Beyond advertising on Facebook, Twitter or other medium companies are using social networks to build teams that solve problems faster, share information better among their employees and partners, bring customer ideas for new product designs to market earlier, and redesign all kinds of corporate software in Facebook's easy-to-learn style.

Companies can also use blogs and social sites to bring customers into their product-design process. They can  use customers' feedback to improve services, and gather ideas that can help them.

It may also be a good idea to use twitter as a tool to gather feedback on your products or services before it is being posted on Yelp or other sites which could affect your reputation.

Social media is also a great tool to build relationship with current clients, and stay in touch with them. If you don't I am afraid you will lose a lot by neglecting them. Your choice: either you'll survive or you'll close your doors.

What Customers Want

In an increasingly competitive environment and with the social media trend, customers become more and more sophisticated and demanding. People go out and spend their hard-earned money at regular and high-end places like the Ritz-Carlton where they receive ultimate comfort and care from genuine human beings.


Don't think that the guests will be satisfied with a less than  excellent service at your organization since your customers visit other high-end destinations. They are entitled to get the most value for their money. The real danger for your company is that customers are inevitably going to compare you to those companies who offer impeccable service and indelible experience. Since they buy, shop and dine at so many different places in town your level of service and courtesy will be tested and compared to all others they have previously experienced.


Fail to impress them with your offer, product, service and you will hear from them when they post an online review based on their experience. If you fail to collect enough stars your reputation will be damaged, you will fail to gather enough word of mouth from unhappy customers and your bad service will be spread all over the the neighborhood, city, the web and the world.


You can either take advantage of the power of social media to build customer loyalty or you can let the public criticize you in front of everybody. A restaurant that excels in reaping authentic, positive reviews from their customers will be seen on the reviews sites as being popular, well-liked, and a safe choice... and this attracts new people.

Your Restaurant, Your Brand, your Future in Business

As soon as someone Googles, Yelps, Facebooks, Open Table goes to your web site, parks in your lot or walks through your door, your brand is up for praise, criticism or I don't care. A restaurant can have the most up to date web site, or be the talk of the moment that creates excitement but if someone walks in the door and has to wait to be greeted and seated due to indifferent employees then that guest won't have such a great dining experience.

If the bathrooms are dirty it won't reassure anyone about what else is dirty. If your employees are not cleaned, well shaved or have dirty clothe a guest may questions you even more. If a guest has to wait 30 minutes or more for a dish, it may irritate him/her. If The food is not served at the right temperature you won't look good. If a guest has an empty glass of water you fail again. If a guest has an empty glass of wine, it is not so good either. If your staff is not pleasant you lose again. If the food is to blend or too salty, ouch! If an employee use the wrong word (guys, folks, bro, dude, buddy, hey etc..) you show disrespect towards the guests. If you do not clear the dishes on time or not appropriately you fail again.

I could go on and and as you can see it there are a lot of things that can go wrong during a course of a dining experience. All those things do not even include hospitality. The way your staff should conduct from the time the guest enters your restaurant till they leave.

• What will the guests remember the most? 
• Did your employees go above and beyond? 
• Did your employees impress the guest?
• Will the guest leave with an indelible memory?
• Can the guest live without you?

• If you have not focused on any of those point above, how will you survive in such a competitive environment?
• How long will it take for new and innovative restaurants to knock you off?

Probably sooner than later.

Are you an industry leader with integrity? Do you have a corporate culture?

If you do not want to be knocked off by the competition you should have a strong culture. That's how you achieve, excellent service on a consistent basis. You'll never have a product or price advantage again. They can be too easily duplicated. But a strong customer service culture can't be copied.

What advantages do you have today, that you will be able to keep forever?

Andre Plessis
Restaurant & Hospitality Consulting

Should you Prioritize Caring For others or Profit-Maximizing to The Expense of ALL OThers

Should you prioritize Caring for others or Profit-Maximizing at the expense of all others including your employees and customers?

Care.

Care more than you need to, more often than expected, more completely than the other person.

Cared deeply about what you do and how you touch the other persons.

The reason to care is that it increases customer retention, profitability and brand value. Caring gives you a reason to do the work you do in the first place. Your business should not just be about making money and maximizing profit, but instead you should have a higher purpose, which will inevitably lead you to greater profit.

 

You will never make more profit if your sole focus is profit. It is remotely impossible. If you care more than others, customers and employees will be happier.

Care More.

L.A. program offers healthcare for illegal restaurant workers

About 75,000 restaurant workers in Los Angeles don't have access to insurance. Under the program, called ROC-MD, uninsured workers pay $25 a month so they can go to one of several clinics run by St. John's Well Child and Family Center for physicals, basic dental care and treatment for common illnesses. The program started last fall, but organizers formally announced it Wednesday and are now recruiting more participants.

The coverage doesn't replace traditional health insurance but helps ensure that workers have a place to go for preventive care so they don't end up in emergency rooms.

 http://rocunited.org/our-work/membership-leadership-development/roc-md/
 

Affordable Health Care for All
ROC-United believes that access to a medical doctor should be a right for all restaurant, bar, and club workers—regardless of income or immigration status.  We also know that restaurant workers are busy and may not have time to find a doctor, or figure out available services.  That’s why we’re offering ROC M.D. to help uninsured restaurant workers access and build relationships with doctors to help improve their quality of life through regular consultations and preventative visits. Note that ROC M.D. is not any kind of insurance, and does not cover comprehensive care.  It simply provides access to primary care, and peace of mind.
What is ROC M.D.? A Health Care Cooperative where members contribute funds to a common pool of money that is used to pay for medical visits.
Who qualifies? Restaurant workers without health insurance, who are members of ROC.
What about Restaurants? Restaurants can pay a small monthly fee to cover all of their uninsured restaurant workers.
Services offered:

- Annual physical exams
- A doctor to answer your questions
- Early intervention
- Low-cost lab & blood work
- Low-cost diagnostic exams
- Low-cost prescriptions
- Referrals to advanced medical care for the lowest possible cost
- Dental care where available
- Vision care where available

To Learn more about ROC M.D. and to find out if it is offered in your location please email Kenneth Shaw, National Health Insurance Program Coordinator at ken@rocunited.org.