At the heart of every restaurant’s potential for profit and success is the quality and consistency of their guest experience.
A consistent, quality guest experience translates into loyal, returning customers and the best advertising of all, positive WOM.
Have you ever thought about what’s the MOST important part of your restaurant’s guest experience? In other words, if you could be over-the-top best in one area, what would it be? Food? Speed or timing of the service? Atmosphere? Sparkling restrooms? Friendly? Or something else?
When we talk about different aspects of the guest experience they tend to fall into one of two categories, the tangible (technical) and the human (emotional) parts of the experience.
The tangible parts of the guest experience would include the food, atmosphere, cleanliness and timing. To excel here requires excellence based on skills or competence to do quality work.
The human or emotional part has to do with things like the sincerity of the greeting, smiles, eye contact and projecting a warm, friendly demeanor. This requires what is often referred to as hospitality, based on having a team who genuinely cares about people and has a strong desire to make their guests feel well-served and appreciated.
So which is more important, excellence or hospitality? This would make for an interesting discussion, but we believe it’s clear that to create a superior guest experience you need skills and competent execution to create quality and consistency but also, hospitality, to connect with your guests on an emotional or human level too.
