No one will disagree that running a restaurant is a difficult, and expensive, endeavor. They usually operate on razor thin margins and the potential of closure often looms like the Sword of Damocles. This year, we've seen some high-visibility closures while other, more under-the-radar restaurants, have closed as well. A number of articles have discussed some of the reasons for these closures, exploring the significant obstacles facing most restaurants.
I'm here to discuss one other contributory factor, bad service. With thousands of restaurants competing for customers, a restaurant needs to do its best not to turn customers away. They not only need to provide good food & drink, but their service needs to be good as well. And if there are service issues, the restaurant needs to correct the issue and find a way to make it up to their customers.
Otherwise, you could be turning away a customer who will tell their friends and family about their bad experience, or even write about it on Yelp or Trip Advisor. That single bad experience could easily lead to dozens of other people, if not many more, choosing not to dine at that restaurant. Can a restaurant afford to turn away all those potential customers, especially when avoiding that matter was fairly easy?
During the past week or so, there's been three service-related incidents which have come onto my radar, bringing this issue to the forefront for me. First, while attending a local convention at a hotel, I dined at the hotel restaurant twice for dinner. Both times, my dinner was not served in a timely fashion, and in one of those incidents, a server actually gave away my dinner to someone else. Such a long wait for relatively simple dishes. In both incidents, a manager merely apologized without any offer to otherwise remedy the situation, even when I explained this was the second time in two nights that this issue occurred.
Second, a relative of mine gave a restaurant recommendation to a friend, a suburban restaurant which I like very much. The friend is a local, who had never been to this restaurant before, and who frequently dines out. Unfortunately, when she went to the restaurant, the host was so rude to her that she chose not to dine there and will never return. And I'm sure she will tell her friends about her bad experience, and more potential customers will be lost. As they say, you never get a second chance to make a first impression.
Third, other friends dined at a high-end, and pricey, Boston restaurant, enjoying the food, but multiple service issues turned it into what I think of as a nightmare of an experience. An inattentive server, an unfriendly hostess, a large chip in a cocktail glass, an undue delay in service of one of their entrees, and more. And nothing, beyond a perfunctory apology, was done to compensate them for all these service problems. Not even a free dessert or cocktail. At such high-end restaurants, you expect superb service and the best places do their best to resolve service issues, to make the customer happy. This restaurant allowed these customers to leave unhappy, and they will probably never return, and will also spread the word of their negative experience. For one, I won't dine there after learning of this experience.
That restaurant could have easily helped to ameliorate the situation, maybe a comped round of drinks, or comped desserts, or comp the late entree. It would have been a small price for the restaurant to pay to make the customers happier. The customers would have likely appreciated the small effort and returned another time, giving the restaurant a second chance to show its best. Instead, the customers left unhappy and the restaurant will lose them and others. That isn't the way to run a successful restaurant.
I've had service issues at numerous restaurants, including some of my favorites. The difference is in how the restaurant handles the issue. Those restaurants which make the effort to fix the issue, to make the customer happy, are those which are quickly forgiven a temporary lapse. No restaurant is perfect and mistakes sometimes get made. Most customers understand this and are willing to make allowances, provided the restaurant does its part to make matters right.
This is a factor that is fully in the restaurant's control. They need to be proactive in dealing with service errors, to try to ensure a customer doesn't leave unhappy. As an unhappy customer may never return, and as they spread the word of their bad experience, you could lose more customers as well. Can you really afford to turn off all those customers, especially when the solution is relatively easy and inexpensive?
Service, Service, Service. Never forget its importance to the success of your restaurant.
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