The Importance of Guest Experience in New Restaurants

Why it is critical to focus on the quality of the guest experience when opening a new restaurant?

HSMAI has gathered some best practices from Rohit Sachdev, CEO of Soho Hospitality around the importance of the guest experience right at that point where you’re opening a new restaurant. We’re happy to share this with you as part of our “Restaurant Profit hub” which provides resources and strategies to help you make the most of your F&B outlets.

Launching our 7th restaurant concept El Santo came with significant labour and resource challenges:

↪ High staff turnover due to lack of availability of qualified staff
↪ Many low level staff left the industry post-COVID
↪ Staff have such distrust with the industry that any small issues resulted in a few of them not showing up for work and walking out of the job without any notification.

Despite these challenges, we came together as a team and borrowed staff from other restaurants to stabilise and commence the business operations.

Once we opened it was super important to get access to data analytics on the voice of the customer. We did the following:

🔍 Listen to Customer Feedback

▶ Refining menu items and service based on online and in person feedback. We found out that many vegetarians were coming to the restaurant and immediately increased our vegetarian and vegan options. It was received very positively.
▶ We always asked our customers in our surveys what was the best thing that they liked about us and areas for improvements.

Once we gathered insights from them collectively we implemented those suggestions that aligned with the business.

🎯 Enhance the Overall Experience

▶ Focused on exceptional service, food, and beverage quality
▶ Added live musicians for a memorable entertainment dining atmosphere
▶ We received low ratings on service standards because of the labour shortage issue. We immediately began rigorous daily training on service sequences and service standards as a key area of focus.

📈 Aim for Positive Word of Mouth

▶ Concentrated on Net Promoter Score (NPS), we needed to make sure that we were receiving an NPS score of over 50, considered excellent.
▶ We also looked at our percentage of repeat visitors which was only 29%, lower than all Soho restaurants, After working hard to improve on all aspects of the guest experience, El Santo is now at a record high of 44% of returning customers after 6 months of operations
▶ Ensured every guest had an experience worth recommending to get the positive word of mouth to others who may have not visited our restaurant.
▶ In instances where we did not receive good ratings from customers we immediately implemented service recovery to bring them back and change their opinion on our restaurant at such a critical phase of our journey.

Working on all of this wasn’t easy, but it paid off immensely. Today, El Santo thrives, with guests loving their experiences. We receive great reviews on Google as well as on our booking platform Seven Rooms and we haven’t looked back.

Lesson learned: In hospitality, it’s not about how many you serve, but how well you serve them. If you start with a good momentum, it is a precedent for future success.

Stay committed to excellence, and success will follow. 🌟

hashtagSohoHospitality hashtagCustomerExperience hashtagElSanto hashtagServiceQuality hashtagCustomerFeedback

Author:

Rohit Sachdev, Chief Executive Officer l Owner I Entrepreneur | Master Storyteller l Restaurateur l Interior Designer l Keynote Speaker

Originally published in: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7219312842494070785/

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