Article
Focus on Guest Delight
When it comes to service, everyone talks about the importance of making sure your guests are satisfied. Satisfaction is certainly better than dissatisfaction, but in today's competitive market, satisfaction will not be enough to keep you growing and prospering over the long term.
As the foodservice pie gets sliced into more and more pieces, it is important to go beyond mere satisfaction and become memorable in the eyes of your guests. To be memorable, we must not only meet our guests' expectations, we must exceed them. In other words, we must make sure our guests are delighted!
Diner delight is more important than good service because it has a different focus. As you probably know, the problem with talking to your staff about good service is that it is too easy to define service from the perspective of the person providing it.
| Manager: "Did you give them good service?" | |
| Server: "Yes, I did!" | |
| Manager: "Well then, why haven't they been back?" |
What makes delight so powerful is that it cannot be defined from the server's point of view. To see if the guest is delighted, you must look at the dining experience from the guest's perspective - the only point of view that really matters! Focusing on delight will force you to see everything that happens in the restaurant through your guests' eyes and that will keep you more in touch with their dining experience.
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