MANAGEMENT
The Perils of too much Education
C
ustomer service goes beyond high grades and theories of management. Catering institutes in India vie with each other to offer the latest in education to students, even if courses are dated in the late vestiges of the last century. The mushrooming of institutes has led a piquant situation in which there are a number of catering personnel coming out of the institutes and marching straight into the arms of recruitment agencies who promise the skies to the bright-eyed aspirants. Most training and education programs miss out on some important factors of the business. The trainee could have the right info about the right way to serve wine and lay the table but it is important to develop his attitude to the job that will determine whether the training is put to practice if at all. This lack of awareness is confined not only to the innocent students and trainees but also to the owners and managers of food outlets. Burdened with the practical aspects of building sales and marketing inputs, the nitty-gritty of running the restaurant business is often taken for granted. Ask the average restaurateur how important customer service is to business, and one usually gets a strong positive response. However on probing further the response to the question- “Do you objectively measure customer your service in any way?” normally elicits a negative response. For example on asking if they have put into place any special recruitment or training systems to ensure customer service delivery the puzzled and quizzical response explains it all. What exactly is the key? Customer
Dec-Jan ’22
service can be understood as a positive perception of human interaction. Research and experience reveals that it is worth at least 40 percent of your customers’ perception of the business with the rest made up of product and environment. Customers vote for a hospitality business with their wallets and purses, and form the decision to return according to their own, unique perception of what they experience while they’re there. C re at i o n of re a l l y g o o d c u s to m e r service requires the management of quite a complex set of variables, and is very unlikely to happen by accident. If you go into any restaurant or hotel and receive consistent good service right across their staff, it means the organisation is a very special one indeed. It all starts with a clear vision of what the establishment is trying to create, together with the evolution of what constitutes service performance targets. How long should a customer stand in a restaurant entrance before he is greeted? How long should a guest have to wait for a drink in a dining area or a bar? All eating joints’ owners and managers probably want cheerful, helpful service, but how many specify these as targets within their business? How often it is seen that there is really good service from one or two staff and pretty average service from the rest? This usually happens where the recruitment process applied within the business is not thorough enough to identify and reject the applicants who are not naturally service oriented. The end result is a mixture of staff whose service delivery is okay when a manager or supervisor is watching and
Hammer Food & Beverage Business Review
inconsistent when there is no supervision. Most non-service oriented staff drops the pretence that got them the job when there is nobody in authority watching. Here lurks a trap, wherein it is easy for the manager or supervisor to get an inaccurate picture of the service standard they are delivering because the service is good whenever they are watching. Another downside is that only constant supervision ensures customer service standards. The real foundation of good service is good recruitment. If you get the right people they will run your business for you, and they will preserve a consistent standard of service whether you are there or not — because they want to, not because you want them to. Good recruiting should concentrate on finding people with the right attitudes rather than the right skills. Skills can be taught quite easily, while it is very difficult to change peoples’ attitudes. A lot of managers try to find experienced staff, only to find that they have inherited the recruiting mistakes of other businesses. Of course, good recruitment must be followed up with good training or it can’t capitalise on those good attitudes. The right people are quite easy to train — they want to learn; they want to get it right. A structured training program over a week or two, applied to the right people, can produce wonders. The important thing is to train all staff into the same system — and not let supervisors or senior staff train them the way they want lest you get wildly inconsistent performance across the team. Catering institutes need to incorporate this into their education systems so that their students emerge as better employee material for the fast growing food business. n
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