How can a restaurant provide good service?

Through user tags and portraits, catering outlets can optimize services, such as personalized services upon reservation, addressing customers by name upon arrival, and exclusive menus when ordering, thereby improving customer satisfaction and sales.

I believe everyone can feel that from the second half of last year to now, many industries, especially the catering industry, have been in a difficult situation. So I wondered if I could help stores increase sales and customer satisfaction through product design and operational actions?

It just so happened that I had just finished writing an article some time ago titled "20,000 Words of Practical Knowledge: How to Build a Membership System from 0 to 1", so I thought that user tags (portraits) might be applied to the POS system of catering stores, so this article came about.

Most of the catering store service providers on the market, such as Tiancai Shanglong, Keruyun, Meituan Catering System, etc., basically include the front hall ordering and cashier end, back kitchen end, back-end operation management end, upstream food ordering end, purchase and sales system, etc., and also include a series of hardware products, such as POS cash registers, KDS kitchen display equipment, electronic scales, queue number machines, etc.

The scope of integrated catering solutions is relatively large. This article only selects a very small part of it, namely the ordering card management page of the POS cash register (as shown in the figure below), to briefly discuss how to graft user tags (portraits) into the product, and how waiters and operations can improve store operating performance through tag portraits.

Whether it is Tiancai Shanglong, Keruyun or Meituan catering system, the main pages of their POS cash registers are not very different. However, these manufacturers have hardly done any further mining and expansion of the information of each table of guests, that is, they don’t know their names, how many times they have been here, and what they like to eat, so they can’t provide more detailed and warm customer service.

Regardless of the price and taste of the restaurant, I think that satisfying the customer's dining experience is a guarantee that he will continue to consume in the store in the future. As for how to satisfy the guests at this table, I think there are several aspects worth trying.

1. Provide optional services when booking seats

Customers generally have three ways to dine in a restaurant: online reservation, phone reservation, or direct visit. In fact, the store's service to customers starts from the moment of reservation. The left picture below is Haidilao's online queuing reservation page, and the right picture is XX Hotpot's online queuing reservation page.

The good thing about Haidilao is that you can check special needs and choose corresponding services according to the scene of the visit. For example, on birthdays, the store may collect flowers and cakes on your behalf. Business banquets require the preparation of decanters and wine dispensers. Dates and other scenes may involve setting up the venue, such as hanging banners and display stands.

The advantage of XX Hotpot is that you can view the number of tables and the time in the queue in real time, so that customers can have reasonable psychological expectations before queuing, but the merchant reminds that the "dining together" mode is a bit too harsh in my opinion.

I think if we can absorb the advantages of both companies and eliminate their disadvantages, perhaps the combined new seat reservation model may be more effective.

If the customer makes a reservation by phone, you can connect to the CRM or POS cash register system based on the customer's incoming mobile phone number, find out that the customer's historical consumption scenarios are mainly business receptions, and proactively ask the customer whether he needs a private room or a quiet hall, whether he needs to order food in advance, etc.

2. Address customers by name when they arrive at your store

The catering industry is a typical service industry. Good service is not about shouting slogans, but about taking action in details. Remembering the customer's name is a small but very important thing.

Many people have heard of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. If the need for respect is met, people will be confident in themselves and enthusiastic about society. If the store service staff remembers the customer's name, it will increase the customer's sense of identity and favorability towards the restaurant and increase the possibility of repeated consumption.

Although we cannot demand that the waiter remember the customer's name accurately, he should at least remember the customer's last name. For example, when the receptionist leads the customer to his seat, he can say "Sir, your seat is at table 14" and "Mr. Zhan, your seat is at table 14". The effect of these two statements is completely different. The latter can make the customer feel valued, so that he/she will want to come again next time.

3. Provide exclusive menu during ordering

Everyone should be familiar with the concept of "one thousand faces for one thousand people", that is, the product information and content presented to each user when entering e-commerce apps such as JD.com and Taobao are different, but almost no one does this in catering stores.

Most people have their favorite dishes when eating hotpot. For example, I always order tripe, yellow throat, jun ba and jun hua every time I eat hotpot. However, every time I go to eat hotpot, it always takes me a long time to find or search for the corresponding dishes (the search is not very easy to use). It takes more than 10 minutes for three people to order the dishes.

Is it possible that the store can automatically read the customer's favorite/frequently ordered dishes based on the identity information of the person who scanned the code to order food, saving the customer time in ordering food? Then the store can also list the top 10 most ordered dishes this week/this month, which can also help customers with choice difficulties and some customers who want to try new flavors but are afraid of making bad choices to save time in ordering food.

If customers take a shorter time to order, it means that the dining time will most likely be shortened, thereby increasing the table turnover rate.

4. Extraordinary service during dining

After that, we will enter the dining stage, which is the most important part of the store service. To do this well, I think we can add a customer details page. The page is designed based on the size of 1024*768px. Due to the time constraints, only a simple wireframe draft was made. Please note.

For example, if a waiter normally takes care of four tables, it is highly likely that the waiter will not be able to distribute his energy evenly among the guests at these four tables, and there will be some energy imbalance. So how should the energy be distributed? The customer dashboard may provide some reference for decision-making.

• For example, waiter Zhang San is in charge of four tables, ABCD. The guests at table A have a consumption level of V9 (corresponding to a consumption amount of more than 9,000 yuan), and the other three tables are V8, V6 and V4 respectively. No matter who takes over, there is a high probability that they will pay special attention to table A.
• Based on Mr. Zhan's historical consumption scenarios at Table A, it can be judged that his main visit to the store is for business reception. After the guests at Table A are seated, waiter Zhang San can proactively ask whether they need services such as ashtrays and wine dispensers, or prepare them in advance in case of emergency.
• If a dish on Table A, such as thousand-layer tripe, is sold out, you can ask Mr. Zhan if it can be replaced with rocket squid or thousand-thread yellow throat based on his historical order information.
• When table A is about to finish dining and pay the bill, you can ask Mr. Zhan whether he wants an invoice from Company A or Company B based on his historical billing information, and ask him whether he needs a parking ticket or wants to exchange a parking coupon.
• Marketing can be initiated proactively based on Mr. A’s stored-value card balance, asking him whether he wants to participate in recharge gift activities, and whether he needs to redeem his expiring points for peripheral dolls or other products from catering outlets.
• Further expansion of consumption scenarios can be made based on the store scenarios. For example, for business receptions, customers can be asked whether they need to bring 2 boxes of hot pot base gift boxes for the customers. If it is a family gathering or a gathering of friends, suitable peripherals or gifts can be given as gifts after a certain consumption amount is met. If there are children, dolls can be given as gifts, and for workers, lunch boxes/mouse pads/desktop ornaments/canvas bags can be given as gifts, etc.

5. Don’t seek the best, just the most expensive

Nowadays, many people not only pursue the taste of food, but also pay special attention to the dining environment, atmosphere and face, especially for business receptions and some banquets. Even if the taste of a certain fly restaurant can be rated 90 points, in the above scenario, it may be more appropriate to take guests or customers to a star hotel or Michelin restaurant for a 60-point meal. This is just like what is said in the movie "Big Bowl", not the best but the most expensive.

Here is a vivid example. On Mother's Day, I took my family to a garden hotpot restaurant that covers hundreds of acres and has invested more than 50 million yuan. There was a QR code for song ordering posted on each table. After scanning the code, I went to the following song ordering page. The price of this song ordering is a bit expensive in the Chengdu catering industry.

During the meal, I told my wife that if there were 50 or 61 songs, I might order a song for my wife and mother-in-law, but the price was obviously not economical, so it would be better to order a few meat dishes to satisfy our appetite. My wife and I thought that no one would order songs or that there were not many people ordering songs, but in the 1.5 hours of the meal, the guests kept ordering songs.

We are still superficial. This pricing is obviously to filter out small customers like me, just like some fraudulent text messages look fake. If I were a businessman, today I would host a banquet for my important customers at the most luxurious Garden Hotpot in the west of Chengdu. I would open several bottles of Moutai and Wuliangye 1573, order the most expensive dishes, and charge 1,000 per person. Would this give the guests enough face?

It was enough, but not completely enough. I scanned the code to order two more songs for the customer, and let the customer choose the songs when ordering, so that he could see the price of the song and feel my respect and appreciation for him. The singer came to the table No. 888 by the lake in a small wooden boat. Before singing, he gave a speech: Mr. Zhan from table No. 888 ordered a song "Good Luck" for Mr. Li and Mr. Wang, hoping that XXXX company would have a prosperous business and abundant financial resources. During the singing, the singer did not forget to congratulate Mr. Li and Mr. Wang from table 888 several times.

The speakers transmitted the singer's congratulatory words to every corner of Yuanlin Hotpot, which was similar to the server-wide announcement after the boss was killed in the game. Guests at other tables around cast envious eyes at the guests at table 888. Mr. Li, Mr. Wang and other guests at table 888 also felt very proud. They said, "Mr. Zhan, you spent a lot of money." But they were already very happy in their hearts. At the same time, they secretly thought: Next time I invite Mr. Zhang and Mr. Zhao, they must come here and order two songs for them.

At this time, Mr. Luo, who was also hosting a banquet at table 999, felt the subtle expressions on the faces of his guests, Mr. Wu and Mr. Jiang. Mr. Luo, who was good at observing people's words and expressions, captured the important information, so he quickly scanned the code with his mobile phone and handed it to Mr. Wu and Mr. Jiang to let them choose songs. After Mr. Wu and Mr. Jiang were half-hearted, they couldn't bear to let Mr. Luo down, so they ordered a song "My Good Brother".

This cycle repeats. Then, do you still think that this song of 280 is expensive? Therefore, high-end restaurants can think about it carefully and do not have similar projects or services that do not seek the best but the most expensive.

6. Develop new consumption scenarios to promote repeat consumption

In-store dining is only an important mode for catering stores to provide catering services. For those customers who are unwilling to dine in stores, hot pot takeaway is actually a good choice. For example, Haidilao, which we are familiar with, achieved revenue of 1.04 billion yuan in its hot pot takeaway business in 2023, accounting for about 2.5% of its total revenue (its total revenue in 2023 was 39.2 billion yuan).

In recent years, the trend of consumption downgrade has been obvious. Many people feel that the cost-effectiveness of hot pot in stores and takeaways is still not high, and it is better to cook it at home. Therefore, hot pot brands such as Haidilao and Shu Daxia not only sell hot pot base in offline supermarkets, but also sell hot pot base online on Taobao, JD.com or their own mini-program malls.

Moreover, hotpot restaurants, especially large chain hotpot restaurants, have an inherent advantage in selling hotpot soup bases that other business formats do not have, that is, the stores can become pick-up points for users who purchase online and pick up offline. This can save logistics costs (the factory originally has to deliver the soup bases to the stores) and also improve the timeliness of delivery for customers. For example, I can pick up the food when I pass by the store after get off work.

Where do customers for hotpot restaurants' takeaway business and online shopping malls come from? I think they can pull out a customer list from the existing customer pool, filter out those customers who have already experienced the takeaway and online base business, and then send SMS marketing to the rest.

postscript

The above content is just some of my conjectures. It has not been tested in practice in catering stores. Some of them are only feasible in theory but may not be very reliable in practice, such as:

• When waiter Zhang San was taking care of 4 tables of guests, he gave priority to table A, which had the highest spending power. The priority standard was too vague.
• Ask the waiters to remember the customers' last names. In the stores I frequently visit over the past 10 years, no one knows my last name.
• Most catering waiters do not have the service initiative and service awareness that I imagine, but some sales managers may have them.
• The system cannot identify consumption scenarios and can only manually mark whether it is a business reception, family gathering, friend gathering, etc., but it is highly likely that no one will mark it.
• The dish preference is what Mr. Zhan ordered the most in all his consumption records, but it may not be what Mr. Zhan likes to eat, so this data is very useless.
• Some ordering mini-programs support multiple customers scanning the code to order at the same time, so the content of the customer details page may require multiple customers to switch. That is, after reading Teacher Zhan’s information, you can also switch to view Teacher Li’s information. However, this will make the interaction more complicated, but what business value can this bring?

So just take it as a joke. If it is feasible, suppliers such as Tiancai Shanglong, Keruyun, and Meituan Catering may have already done it. Maybe they also thought of these ideas, but after evaluation, they thought that the priority was too low and it was still lying at the bottom of the demand pool. Or maybe they had some internal arguments and deeper demand research and analysis, and finally found that this was a false demand and gave up.

But I personally think that some of the ideas above may be used to fool restaurant owners, so I plan to delete them all after writing them, but it is not easy to write, and these conjectures of mine may be inspiring to some readers, so I think I will post them.

Finally, I hope that the business of restaurants will improve and that the physical industry will recover as soon as possible.

Author: Mr. Zhan, public account: Mr. Zhan