Think of your crew training as a marketing project and your brand experience will benefit.

When consumers choose a restaurant, they expect a seamless integration of product, service, and atmosphere that ties back to the restaurant’s brand image. If training programs are downsized or focused on minimal operational tasks then the service aspect of the experience falls short in meeting the customers’ expectations and ultimately undermines a restaurant’s marketing investments.

In today’s environment, where only the strongest brands survive, this trend in short-changing training efforts is creating a growing competitive opportunity to reorient managers and employees with the brand experience. Not only can this orientation enhance the experience for the customer but it also inspires employees when their role can be defined by something more than operating cash registers, fryers, and fountain machines.

What’s Missing Unfortunately, front-line workers typically aren’t screened or equipped to be the brand ambassadors their customers expect them to be. Bob Phibbs, “the Retail Doctor,” says that much of what is causing quick serves to struggle in this environment has to do with their failure to recognize the importance that customer service plays in fulfilling the brand promise at the point of sale: “No one wants the experience that’s currently being delivered. You get plastic people meeting customers at the point of contact when you want to be memorable to them. You’ve got to go back to the things that made most of these brands great.”

The core issue, Phibbs says, concerns what employees are taught to focus on. He says that all too often, “we give people a checklist to go over like bathroom schedules. Clean this. We don’t teach them how to talk to people.” Kevin Higar, a senior research manager at Technomic, agrees. “If the employer is not putting the training out there, about the menu items, or what the employees should do when they interact with the customer, [customers] are going to leave if they don’t feel comfortable,” he says. “It’s the employees’ job to make the customer happy. So get them invested.”

What’s Needed Higar says the most successful restaurant concepts are those that look at the brand experience from the customer’s perspective. He tells me Technomic has a “winning restaurant formula,” which includes a combination of a solid coverage of service and food as well as hospitality and lifestyle integration. According to him, concepts “win” when their crew “embodies what the concept is and delivers that to the customer on every visit.”

Hello everyone, I just came across this message board recently and its my first time posting here.

It's my simple understanding that in order to calculate Average Meal Price you divide total sales by the number of meals sold (number of covers).

And the Average Check would be calculated by.....?

I'm thinking it's the same thing, but the only difference (if there is one) would be to include sales tax, right?
 

Isn’t that what the restaurant business is all about? It’s about me and what I want, whether "me" is the owner, employee or customer.

Any thoughts?

One thought I’ll share is it seems that there is a minimum and unequal level of satisfaction for each.

If the owner has 1 happy day out of 10, it’s probably enough to keep the owner plugging away. (10% minimum)