SERVICE

Ego needs

Satisfying customer needs is not solely about providing them with the food they want; you must also consider their other expectations. Customers have ‘ego’ needs that will, when satisfied, greatly increase their experience with you. Examples of ego needs are:

• being recognised;
• feeling wanted;
• being respected;
• being appreciated;
• being listened to;
• wanting some control over a situation;
• wanting people to empathise with them.

Customer service takes ‘ego needs’ into account and aims to satisfy them by adopting the following principles:

Customer service is something that should be at the heart of your business if you want to be successful. Both you and every member of your staff must be aware of the importance of providing a first-class service to your customers.

Being excellent

Research shows that excellent service builds your reputation and your profits. (‘Service Excellence=Reputation=Profit’, Professor Robert Johnston, 2001.) In this report, excellent and poor providers of service were distinguished like this:

The excellent	The poor
Deliver the promise.	Don’t do what they said.
Make it personal.	Are so impersonal.
Go the extra mile.	Don’t make any effort.
Deal well with problems and queries.	Don’t deal with problems.

The report also showed that organisations providing excellent service were more productive (average profit per employee was 72% higher) and more profitable (average profit was 74% higher) than ones providing poor service.

Offering excellent service satisfies customer needs and provides tangible benefits to your business; it is also an effective way of gaining competitive advantage over your rivals.

The ‘magic minute’

The ‘magic minute’ is a useful term that explains the importance of greeting your customers within 60 seconds of them being seated for a meal. It primarily applies to food operations where orders are taken from customers at their tables, though the principle could equally apply to people coming to the bar to order food.

Waiting for longer than a minute to be acknowledged can cause irritation and frustration; a first impression that can sour a customer’s whole experience. Though a one-minute wait doesn’t seem very long, a person’s perception of time is often very different from reality, and one minute waiting to be acknowledged is often perceived as much longer.

Adhering to the ‘magic minute’ rule helps keep your customers happy.

Handling complaints

No matter how professional and customer-focused your food operation, customer complaints are inevitable at some point (justified or otherwise). Over the last decade the UK public, who were traditionally reluctant to complain, are now more likely to voice their concerns if they are unhappy. This should be regarded as a positive situation; it is better to have problems brought to your attention, giving you the opportunity of resolving them, than for people to leave dissatisfied and spread negative comments about your business.

On a positive note, research shows that nearly all customers who have had complaints resolved efficiently are later happy to recommend the business to their friends. Resolving a complaint has also been shown to strengthen the relationship between a business and its customer, with customer loyalty being greater than before the complaint occurred.

Here are the golden rules of complaints handling (from The Institute of Customer Services – see www.instituteofcustomerservice.com):

• Thank the customer for bringing the matter to your attention.
• Say you are sorry the problem has happened. (Not an admission of guilt, just good manners.)
• Look at the issue from the customer’s perspective.
• Start with the point of view that the customer may well have a valid point.
• Gather the facts.
• Don’t leap straight to the free gift route without solving the fundamental problem.
• Fix the problem.
• Learn from the complaint and change something.
• Minimise reasons for complaints through regular reviews.