Commentary

How teaching your employees to provide great guest experiences increases sales

Empowered frontline staff leads to happier customers, which result in increased customer loyalty, consistently higher guest satisfaction, referrals and invariably higher profits. But how do you empower them?

February 18, 2019

By Alyssa Hanson, marketing manager at Intouch Insight

A restaurant's strongest competitive differentiator is the experience they offer their guests. And considering the average lifespan of a restaurant is less than five years (90 percent fail within just one year of opening their doors), that experience can either make or break a restaurant's chance of success.

Restaurateurs go to great lengths to collect and understand feedback about the guest experience through a variety of channels like customer satisfaction surveys and mystery shopping. However, operations teams are falling short when it comes to connecting customer feedback and their frontline teams. As a result, frontline team members aren't able to fully grasp how their day-to-day actions contribute to the overall guest experience, and the effect those actions have on the bottom line.

Results from a 2018 study performed by Intouch Insight indicated that whether customers felt valued was a key indicator of customer satisfaction across 10 gas and convenience chains. Research also indicated that customer satisfaction was influenced most by the responsiveness of frontline employees, followed by price and food quality. But unengaged and unhappy employees were not likely to deliver the responsiveness required to delight customers. It is therefore critical that companies focus their efforts on creating both a brilliant employee and customer experience as part of their overall customer experience strategy.

Let's look at some ways that restaurant operation teams can engage frontline staff.

Treat your frontline staff the way you want them to treat guests

Companies that live and breathe customer experience are successful because they value a customer-centric culture from the top down; and that applies to internal and external customers alike.

Why is this important?

Customers care about the way a company treats its employees. In fact, 87 percent of customers' affinity toward Starbucks is driven by the way the company treats its employees. A recent survey from Deloitte indicated that the single most important quality that a restaurant can have, according to more than 2,000 restaurant guests who were surveyed, was "happy, friendly, and attentive staff."

Happier, engaged staff also tend to stick around longer, which is incredibly important in the restaurant industry because employee turnover costs money! Cornell University's Center for Hospitality Research estimates the cost to be nearly $6,000 for every employee lost. Considering that hospitality rates are high (at over 70 percent according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics), it's critical that employers do everything in their power to engage employees.

How do you engage staff?

Engage your staff by empowering your frontline staff with both the tools and mindset they need to deliver the experience you've asked them to.

Empowerment comes in many forms, one of which is tools and technology. According to the National Restaurant Association, 80 percent of restaurateurs agreed that technology helps increase sales, makes their restaurant more productive and provides a competitive advantage. Recent technology advancements have allowed restaurant chains to adopt cutting-edge tools designed to improve restaurant operations; things like survey and data collection tools, dashboards and analytics, and all kinds of things designed to help improve customer experience. For the most part, however, these tools don't actually help frontline employees to deliver the customer experience they're expected to, and there's no way to link that data to the activities of frontline staff.

That said, there are operations-focused tools out there, like mobile forms software, that help operations teams track the completion of day-to-day activities at individual restaurant locations. However, determining the ROI of these operational tools is a challenge because they're typically not tied to the systems that are tracking customer experience data. If frontline employees had any idea how their actions impact the organization's KPIs, it's very likely that this could influence their overall attitude and the way they deliver on the brand promise through their day to day actions. Zappos is a great example of this, where contact center team members are referred to as "Customer Loyalty Team Members", and all play a critical role in the organization's self-proclaimed "customer-obsessed" culture.

Ask for and act on employee feedback

Another way to empower frontline staff is to ensure there is a process in place for employees to provide feedback on the guest experience. Frontline staff who engage with guests on a daily basis are often an untapped resource and have a unique perspective on how the guest experience can be improved.

Employees want to feel "heard" when they provide feedback, and it has to be seriously considered — never ignored, or even worse — punished. Not only will staff feel empowered, but restaurateurs will also identify CX issues before they turn into bigger problems, and discover new ways to improve.

There are many ways companies can accomplish this. One example of this is, Rutter's, a chain of convenience stores and gas stations. Every quarter, the Rutter's CEO sits down with frontline team members over lunch and solicits ideas about how to improve day to day store operations. Those ideas are shared with senior management who fully vets each one. This practice has led to many new ideas being executed at store-level.

The bottom line
Empowered frontline staff leads to happier customers, which result in increased customer loyalty, consistently higher guest satisfaction, referrals and invariably higher profits.

Alyssa Hanson is the marketing manager at Intouch Insight, a customer experience management company

Cover photo:iStock