Maintaining good QSC (quality, service, and cleanliness) is one of the top concerns for most restaurant brands. After all, great food, friendly service, and a spotless store are the factors that keep guests coming back. Maintaining all three of these factors to guests’ standards can be difficult, however, given the many variables and moving parts that are involved in running a fast casual restaurant. Regional managers can’t control what every employee is doing from one moment to the next, especially if he or she is overseeing more than one location or the restaurant is experiencing an unusual rush.
Thankfully, there are many tools managers can use to stay on top of it. Today, we’re going to talk about mobile technology — specifically, our mobile guest engagement solution — and how it can help improve QSC.
Gather immediate guest feedback
With traditional tools such as comment cards and Yelp reviews, guest concerns often don’t make it to management’s ears until hours, days, or even weeks after they have occurred. This makes it more difficult to solve problems for individual guests, and more, it allows the problems to affect other patrons as well.
But with a mobile feedback channel in place, brands can get insight into guest concerns before they even leave the store. If a guest has a problem during a busy time, for example, and doesn’t want to wait in line to bring it up with a staff member, he or she can simply text it to the store location, where it can be instantly read by a manager or supervisor. The guest can also choose if they want to wait to speak with a manager, or go about their day and receive a response via text. This method opens a dialogue before the guest complains online, and, additionally, ensures the problem will have less of an impact on other guests.
Get instant performance scores
Most companies these days give their employees feedback in annual performance reviews. While these reviews are necessary, the fact of the matter is that employees crave more frequent feedback — on a weekly or monthly basis, to be more precise. Employees who receive more frequent feedback, especially Millennials, are shown to be more engaged in their work, and therefore more productive.
In a busy work environment such as a restaurant, finding time to provide employees with frequent feedback is a challenge. This is where mobile technology comes in. With a solution such as Loop, the guests themselves can tell staff members how they’re performing. Guests rate a restaurant on factors such as quality, service, and cleanliness before they leave the store. This gives staff instant and continuous feedback on their performance throughout the day. If they notice that their performance is flagging in one area, they can immediately alter their behavior or assign a colleague to resolve the problem.
Collect and analyze data
Managers need to have a view into trends and performance if they want to make any meaningful change in how their business runs. By compiling data, they can separate one-time anomalies in service from patterns that signal an underlying problem.
With Loop, data collected from guests through their ratings and comments can be condensed into a report that managers can use to identify trends over time. For example, if the data shows that guests are consistently unhappy with the service every Wednesday at 11 a.m., management can talk to staff members who work at that time to find out what’s going on, and adjust the schedule to ensure that there are enough staff to manage an unexpected rush.
Gamify the workplace
We’ve talked a lot about how employee engagement affects a business’s financial performance. Employees who are not engaged have a negative attitude and care less about the quality of their work. In a customer service environment, this quickly becomes apparent to guests, who may feel uncomfortable and unwelcome — and guests who do not feel valued will not remain loyal.
Gamification has been proven to raise employee engagement and bring economic gains to businesses. Loop gamifies the work environment by scoring employee performance and encouraging friendly competition between shift rotations and store locations. This gives team members a sense of purpose about their work and motivates them to strive for better performance every single day.
How do you monitor and improve your restaurant’s QSC? Let us know in the comments, or on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter.
