Modern and Old-Fashioned Ways to Improve your Restaurant’s Operations

Modern and Old-Fashioned Ways to Improve your Restaurant’s Operations

Does your restaurant ever have empty tables during the dinner rush? Every restaurant can find places for improvement, and doing so is essential in such a competitive industry. Contemporary restaurants can benefit from modern technology, as well as age-old tricks that have worked for years. Here are some new and old ways to improve the way your restaurant operates.

Employee Scheduling Software

Keep your workers focused on where they’re most useful with software that reduces the time it takes to create work schedules by 80%. You can even make use of the free employee schedule maker to have better control on your employees.  This can save your restaurant between 1-3% in labor costs, which will make a tangible difference to your bottom line. By reducing the number of telephone calls and texts going back and forth during schedule creation by 70%, this also simplifies a frustrating task.

Beyond creating schedules, it also provides efficient and flexible communication channels. Chat groups can be made for the whole team, or for any number of smaller groups for people working in the same department or assigned to certain tasks.

If a manager needs to find someone to quickly cover a shift, they can message the group chat — because everyone gets a notification on their phone, they’ll see right away that coverage is needed, and whoever is free can tell the group. This solves a big problem quickly, before it can escalate to a crisis.

Employee scheduling software is actually an all-in-one, cloud-based solution that becomes the backbone of your restaurant’s operations, so read the ultimate shift scheduling guide so you can appreciation all the other ways it can help your restaurant today.

Old-Fashioned Customer Service

Some restaurant improvements are made behind the scenes, but showing your customers a better time is all about doing better work centre stage. There are studies which show that 89% of customers have stopped doing business with a company after a bad customer experience, while 86% of customers are willing to pay 25% more for a better customer experience.

The takeaway is that it’s important to constantly train your servers in customer experience. It should be engrained in your restaurant’s culture. What this looks like depends on the nature of your restaurant, as there isn’t simply one thing called “customer service” — a fancy Italian restaurant will do it differently than a gastropub. Some approaches to customer service are universal to all restaurants; staff should always be attentive, patient, and positive with customers.

Empower your staff to go the extra mile by giving them permission in advance to give freebies, such as a dessert or round of drinks, to customers who lodge a justifiable complaint. A restaurant is a complex operation, and managers should be prepared for when human error inevitably strikes and a customer gets angry. All waiters should be briefed on what to do to make them happy again.

Food has been the foundation of culture for centuries, and each restaurant fits into this culture in their own unique way. Whether it’s old tricks like diligent attention to customer service so people love their outing or new software that is specifically designed to help restaurants run smoothly and efficiently, use whatever means necessary to improve your restaurant’s operations today.