subject: Improving Restaurant Service: A Means To Stay Alive As A Business [print this page] Service matters a lot for a restaurant, truly fantastic food can help keep a place afloat with bad service, but thats hard to maintain as other people can mimic your food and style and push you out. You need to find ways to improve restaurant service if you want to keep in business. There are human and technological aspects to restaurant service, the way you handle orders is important, as botched orders and lost food can drive customers away. Even if the product produced is fantastic, people dont always want to wait hours for it. Both aspects are important to tackle when you look to improve restaurant service. The ideal is to have a system that is almost mechanically precise, yet have the staff on hand who make people feel like theyre the targets of personalized attention.
The specifics of service will vary by the type and tone of each restaurant. Diner speed at a high end gourmet restaurant would be inappropriate, but the reverse is true as well. Physical layout matters as well. The more straightforward the lay out the less digital you need, however, there are advantages to using more computerized systems. You can reduce the traffic in the kitchens, and improve restaurant service by simply making things readable. Not everyone has good hand writing, and needing to get orders down quickly can produce some very confused scribbles.
However, specifics of each situation aside you do have some constants when it comes to ways to improve restaurant service. The first is to hire and monitor your employees well. You want people who seem warm, friendly, but also professional. While it might not seem like an obvious problem if your wait staff have a bit of fun on the floor, but keep in mind if someones waiting for a table or food and they see the wait staff laughing with each other its easy for them to assume that people arent doing their job. At the same time, most restaurants wont have improved service by instructing their staff to have no emotion or humor. However, staff issues are not entirely a human element. Having software to help record performance and observations of your staff can make staffing easier, and you can improve restaurant service with some automation. Being able set schedules better, and have people working the times theyre able to can help you keep your restaurant staffed, and the staff happy. While you should be more interested in improving restaurant service than having your staff grinning ear to ear, if theyre in a better mood theyre more likely to be friendly and receptive.
