The Connection You Need With Your Customers
The success of customer service is customers feeling valued and important. Surely, every service crew desire to promptly fulfill customer’s demand and achieve 100% customer satisfaction. And of course, every customer deserves their full attention and respect. But, the amount of attention a service crew member can offer to a customer is inversely proportional to the number of customers present in the same time period (see graph). Simply put, a higher rate of service entails a lower customer focus.
Now, a dilemma surfaces – should business owners support a higher rate of service or customer focus?
Let’s delve into the present situation in the different sectors.
F&B
Nowadays, service crew are curtailed to lower labour costs. Consequently, a higher customer-to-service crew ratio inevitably overloads the remaining service crew members who are now required to simultaneously serve more customers (i.e. higher service rate). This gives rise to opportunities of overlooking potential customer needs with a lower customer focus.
Besides, conversion of existing spaces from an open concept to private dining concept is a popular move in recent years. Private dining rooms are especially common in Japanese restaurants. Respecting customers’ privacy and personal space by not disturbing them as much as possible throughout their entire dining experience has become an essential element of quality customer service. Nevertheless, it is taxing to monitor all the customers in separate rooms with limited service crew members.
Let me introduce to you a virtual connector between customers and service crew members – Service Call System. A press of the button signals a service demand and identifies the service requested (whether an order, bill, etc.). Service crew no longer needed to chase after customer demand by shadowing customers around and only respond to deliver a successful service when the need arises. Subsequently, it improves efficiency and reduces workload pressure on the service crew. Furthermore, with physical monitoring made redundant, private dining rooms are no longer an obstacle to providing a quality customer service.
Hotel
Poolside Restaurant or Bar is not an unfamiliar sight in hotels. In some hotels, the dining space extends from indoor to outdoor. The large area and limited number of waiters impede the quality of customer service provided. Moreover, waiters approaching customers to take order, prepare bill, serve food or attending to requests requires travelling time. In other words, customer’s waiting time is prolonged.
For illustration purposes, let’s consider the Bill Payment Process.
By deploying the Service Call System, the waiter is immediately notified of customer’s intention to make a payment and directly retrieve the bill for the customer. This reduces unnecessary movements within the front-of-house premise and hence improve productivity and customer service.
Another common feature of hotels is the conference rooms. These rooms, offering a space for guests to hold meetings or important events, also require hotel staff to facilitate a smooth process. For full customer satisfaction, at least a hotel staff is usually attached to a conference room. Then again, it is cost inefficient (high labour costs) and unproductive.
Service Call System reverse the responsibility whereby customers’ requests for service when needed instead of hotel staff standing by waiting for the demand. This satiates business owners’ appetite for both higher service rate and customer focus.