Manage the Total Customer Experience – Part 2: While They Dine
In Manage the Total Customer Experience – Part 1, we showed you tips and tools to help you manage your guests’ experiences before they even set foot in the door. Read on to learn more about managing the experience while guests are actually dining in your restaurant.
A critical element in providing the best guest experience is the collection of guest notes. This may seem simple and obvious, but during a busy shift, we often hear from restaurants that this gets overlooked. We’ve found that the most highly rated, successful restaurants on Resy’s platform take the most notes on their customers – a correlation we believe is no coincidence.
Collecting guest notes can empower your team to know a customer’s likes and dislikes, understand context around the special event your guests are celebrating, say hello to them by name, anticipate which table they like and pair them with a server they have built a relationship with.
Sounds like the definition of hospitality, right? Yes, hospitality is providing an enhanced customer experience through the subtle art of observing and noting things about your guests, which in turn, creates regulars, the lifeblood of a long-running, successful restaurant rather than a flash in the pan.
At Resy, we’ve seen a correlation to this in our data. When we look at our top-rated restaurants, as rated by the guests that dined there, the top 20% of these Resy restaurants all have at least one guest note on more than 40% of their guest profiles. Versus the other end of the spectrum, the lower the percentage of at least one guest note on guest profiles, the lower the average guest rating.
With this data in hand, we highly encourage operators to take guest notes, and we’ve made the process as simple and streamlined as possible within our software. As a result, we’ve seen more Resy restaurants take guest notes. Two years ago only 3% of our global guest profiles had at least one note attached – now we see that figure has jumped up to 28%.
Technology not only makes it easier than a pen-and-paper method to log guest notes, but it also helps make it easier to recall this information on your guests to optimize their experience while they dine – and to make sure you don’t miss vital information about them.
To help make accessing this information a streamlined process for your front-of-house team, we’ve added more visual cues to the front of the ResyOS iPad® screen that quickly draw attention to guests with notes, occasions and allergies attached to their profiles. With mobile alerts to any manager’s iPhone® and chit printer, your staff is guaranteed not to miss a note, preference or special request.
In opening their profile or digging a bit further, you can find the number of times the customer has been to your restaurant, so you know who your regulars are. You can also identify how they made their reservation or if they were a walk-in, if they had previously been in as invited guests, or if they have used Resy’s virtual waitlist feature, Notify, to book.
Early feedback on these features from our restaurant partners has been that the time saved with being alerted to previous guest details has allowed them to provide a smarter, personalized guest experience to both convert and keep repeat diners.
In Part 3, the final installment of this series, we will show you how you can manage your diners’ experiences after they’ve gone and persuade them to return for another visit.
About Resy: Resy powers online reservations as part of CHECK® Business Tools. Resy helps your customers reserve tables or join a reservation waiting list easily and quickly online – improving your guests’ experiences, allowing you to share information across all of your restaurants and track your marketing efforts. Learn more about Resy, by visiting Online Reservations in CHECK Business Tools.