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.