The Customer is always right! Lets get & keep the right customers with the right service.

By Sudhakar Hannda

Today the future belongs to establishments that understand quality service. In the coming future Quality service may provide the only competitive edge as distinctions between similar and increasingly numerous hotels and restaurants, become blurred in the consumer's mind. Many companies claim to give good service but don't deliver. In the hospitality business, the best way to find out if your organization really cares is to fill out one of your own comment cards - have a friend do it for you. I'd say a good 50 per cent don't respond and you could be one of them. Or take the telephone answering service of your hotel or restaurant. Extremely revealing. Make a call for an enquiry and hear your staff attend to it. There are surprises in store for you.

Quality begins at the root-level . Have a well-educated and well-trained staff who can respond immediately to every problem there is. You may have heard this before, but I am putting this in a focused perspective, the way I see it -

Just what is good service, anyway? It's the restaurant where you are greeted with a smile and waited on quickly and attentively. Like most of us I will never go back to a place where the service is lousy and I will never tip for bad service. If you reward people for bad service, you encourage more bad service. I'm impressed where employees remember my name.

Quality service may be the least expensive tool for hoteliers to improve their bottom line. With good consistent service, you earn a customer who keeps coming back, and who spreads the good word to as many as five others. Bad service, however, travels much further. Every time you get a complaint, there are 26 people who were unhappy and did not complain. This means you only hear about four per cent of the problems.

How can foodservice and hospitality companies attain the sort of quality service, to get that winning edge ?

Here are some very basic tips you cannot deny:

1. Service must be a management strategy. Management must understand the business they are in - they are in the Service Business.

2. Businesses have to look at why their service is not the Best. Are the hours convenient to customers? If food isn't getting to the table from the kitchen quickly enough, what could be done to solve the problem?

3. Employees must be empowered to make decisions on the spot. Let's say a restaurant has held somebody up for an hour, and the guest's unhappy about it. The employee should be empowered to buy a round of drinks for that guest and his party.

4. Hire the Best People. You have got to hire employees who love customers. Too often we hire employees because they have a pulse and breathe.

5. Educate and train the work force on a regular basis. 99 per cent of customer interaction is with the employees, not with top management.

Service is very much an issue with customers - people are willing to pay for quality service. In the foodservice sector, responsiveness - the willingness to help a customer and to provide him with prompt service - this is extremely important to consumers. Responsiveness is an area most in need of improvement here in India . A condition we all have to really work to ‘redress'. The intent to improve our service is always there, but a lot of the time on the back-burner.

“Quality Service is a never-ending process, not a mile-stone we can reach. I believe this journey has just begun, with foodservice outlets and hotels sprouting all over the country like mushrooms, in the long run, “ responsiveness” could make all the difference! ”

At this crucial moment of the rise of the hospitality industry, like the mythical phoenix, – 2003/4 - what we reflect in our service could affect our bottom line, as never before.

The author is a Hotel Hospitality & Marketing Consultant.