How to Improve Restaurant Service Quality

To improve restaurant service quality, you must focus on leveraging efficient technology, streamlining restaurant operations, prioritizing employee training, managing wait times, and listening to customer feedback.

The main benefit of offering better service at your business is happier customers. A satisfied client is likely to come back and spend more money at your restaurant, ensuring a constant profit. In this article, you will find actionable tips on how to improve restaurant service quality:

If you want to enjoy the benefits listed above, follow this step-by-step guide on how to improve restaurant service quality full of easy to implement tips that deliver fast results.

This is the most important solution for how to improve restaurant service quality. Without a POS system, you risk:

• Human errors: taking orders by hand and delivering them to the kitchen opens you up for a series of unavoidable mistakes like writing down the information wrong or misplaced notes;
• Delayed response times: without a POS, clients will have to wait a longer time for you to take their orders and accept their payments;
• Unhappy customers: if you don’t allow customers to pay with their preferred payment method, you will decrease client satisfaction and lose repeat business.

If you want to offer excellent service quality at your restaurant, you need to take advantage of the GloriaFood POS system. Following the intuitive set-up process, you get to enjoy the numerous features that help you serve clients faster and better, such as:

• Ability to accept a variety of payment options, including cash, credit or debit card, smartphone, and smartwatch;

• Option to connect multiple printers to speed up menu item preparation and service, such as having a separate printer for the bar and the pizza station;

• Fast POS login with RFID cards that enables employees to log in to the POS system with a simple card swipe;

• Menu editor with out of stock feature, so clients are not disappointed when they cannot order a menu item;

• Offline mode so you can still offer the same level of service, even if the internet is down;

• In-store reporting so you can identify ways to improve your service, such as adding more menu items that clients enjoy or offer promotions during slow hours.

• Integrated online ordering: discover a new sales channel that can help you earn more. You can set online orders to be auto-accepted by the POS and sent to the kitchen. If you prefer, you can also accept them manually using the free order-taking app.

You get to enjoy all the above benefits and more with affordable pricing and a FREE POS starter kit. Find out more about the cost.

When your food business gets busy, it can be hard to offer the same level of attention to each customer. How to improve restaurant service quality during rush hours? Enable customers to order by simply scanning a QR code!

With GloriaFood, you can enable on-premise dining in just a few simple clicks. Once seated, clients scan the printed QR code, browse the menu, order their dishes, and pay. All using their mobile phones! This frees up your employees to focus on providing excellent service.

Ultimately, the ones responsible for providing good service in a restaurant are your employees. If you want them to be the best at their job, you must give them the necessary tools. How can you do that? By providing adequate training.

These are the main topics you should cover regularly in training:

• How to greet and interact with customers: to make them feel comfortable and provide them with an experience that will prompt them to return;
• Menu knowledge: servers can make the best recommendations when they know how all dishes taste and what food pairs well with what drink;
• Food safety: how to handle food in a safe way to prevent any food-borne illnesses;
• POS usage: the good news is that the GloriaFood POS system has an embedded training module you can activate to show new employees the ropes without affecting your financial statements.

When you are trying to find the answer to how to improve restaurant service quality, you don’t have to focus just on the front-of-house staff and actions. For excellent service, you need the kitchen workflow to be optimized so each dish is prepared the same and delivered as soon as possible.

Check out these tips on how to improve kitchen workflow:

• Optimize inventory management: by clearly labeling each container, separating ingredients (meat from produce) and using the firstly stored items before the new ones;
• Set clear standard operating procedures: create rules for each part of the preparation process, starting with standard recipes for each menu item and preparation method to cleaning;
• Use the GloriaFood POS system: so orders are automatically sent to the respective kitchen station, enabling staff to start preparing the orders immediately. The POS system also lowers the chance of order mistakes;

How to improve restaurant service quality? Focus on all factors, not just the obvious in-location ones! For example, the table reservation process can influence a customers’ opinion about your restaurant before they even step foot in your space.

Clients are more likely to book a table if they don’t have to speak on the phone, risking being misunderstood. With GloriaFood, you can enable people to book a table directly on your website, in just a few clicks.

You just have to add the widget we provide, for free. Moreover, you can allow customer to also pre-order their food and pay for it at the same time as making a booking.

The way employees feel at their job will influence how they interact with customers. Happy and satisfied staff members are more likely to go above and beyond to provide clients with a remarkable experience. Especially if they are motivated.

Here are a couple of things you can do to create a positive work environment:

• Improve communication between front of house and front of house: to encourage team work and open communication that streamlines all work processes;
• Show encouragement: motivation doesn’t always have to be monetary. Simple acts like thanking employees for taking an extra shifts or acknowledging them when they solved a hard situation can make a difference;
• Offer bonuses: for most amount of tips or most amount of positive reviews to motivate employees to improve their service skills;

One of the key tips for how to improve restaurant service quality is to make customers feel special and valued. Clients are looking for more than just a meal when they go out and extraordinary service will tempt them to return.

Here are a few ways to personalize service:

• Ask for their name and remember them: have employees get acquainted with customers during greeting and try to naturally insert their name into conversation to show they are paying attention;
• Make personalized recommendations: teach servers to ask clients about their food preferences, so they can make accurate suggestions. This will also be helpful for cross selling and upselling.

What is good service in a restaurant? Your customers will tell you! All you have to do is check your online reviews! You will find both praise for what you are doing right and improvement suggestions from clients that were not happy with their experience. Take it as a learning opportunity.

Your service quality also extends to how you reply to reviews. Best practices dictate that you must answer all reviews, both bad and good, in a friendly and professional manner, with the goal of solving problems and increasing loyalty.

Here are a few tips on how to reply to bad reviews:

• Acknowledge the problem to let clients know you understand what upset them;
• Thank them for their time to leave a review;
• Come up with a solution and invite them back.

Promotions aren’t just a way to increase average order value; they also enable you to provide customers with good value for their money. If you want to know how to improve restaurant service quality, start by creating some promotions catered to your target audience.

Here are some examples:

• Discounted menu combos if your main audience are students;
• Lunch deals such as 10% off pizza during lunch if you are near office buildings;
• 3+1 free if you are often visited by families.

You can create all of the above promotions and more using the Promotions module from GloriaFood. It will only take you a couple of seconds to add them to the top of your menu.

The experience clients have at your restaurant isn’t influenced by just the food or how servers interact with them. The ambiance of your place also plays a big role in making customers comfortable enough to persuade them to come back.

This is what you can do to prioritize a comfortable ambiance:

• Music: try to keep the music level down enough to create a lively atmosphere but not overcome people’s voices. You want people to be able to have conversations at a normal volume, not shout;
• Colors: certain colors like blue or gray have a calming effect, while red and orange are said to increase appetite;
• Lighting: let go of big and cold light fixtures that will make the space feel cold. Instead, opt for smaller lights all around the restaurant to create an intimate atmosphere.

Good service in a restaurant is crucial for success, influencing customer satisfaction, loyalty, and the restaurant’s overall reputation. It’s not just about serving food; it’s about creating a positive and memorable experience that keeps customers coming back and recommending the restaurant to others

Serving excellent food is just the first step to a successful restaurant. If it is not backed up by irreproachable service, chances are you will not get many repeat customers.

Instead, if you focus on providing good service in the restaurant, you will enjoy the following benefits:

• Increased customer satisfaction: if clients have a good experience at your restaurant, they are likely to remember it and come back for more;
• Positive online reviews: reviews are currency for restaurants. The more positive reviews you get, the more new customers you attract;
• More word-of-mouth recommendations: satisfied customers will recommend your restaurant to friends and family, broadening your client pool;
• Increased customer lifetime value: with great service, you increase client loyalty and get to enjoy constant revenue from returning clients;
• More revenue: the end goal of good service is to both attract new customers and increase the number of loyal clients, which leads to more profit for your restaurant.

The five dimensions of service quality in a restaurant, often referred to as the RATER model, are Tangibles, Reliability, Responsiveness, Assurance, and Empathy. These dimensions help evaluate the quality of service provided by a restaurant and can be used to improve customer satisfaction.

Service quality doesn’t just refer to how your employees take orders and payments. It takes into account many other factors. To get a better understanding of what affects client perception on service, let’s utilize a tool researchers often use to analyze the hospitality industry: the five dimensions.

The five dimensions of service quality in a restaurant are:

• Tangibles: this is about the physical aspect of your restaurant, including décor, employee outfits, food and beverage presentation. For example, adding art installations on the walls can become an attraction that tempts customers to visit your space;
• Reliability: refers to your restaurant’s ability to provide the same quality of service, be it slow periods or rush hours. For example, using restaurant analytics to schedule employees according to the predicted number of customers will ensure you always provide adequate service;
• Responsiveness: describes how fast restaurant workers are able to respond and satisfy client requests. For example, providing constant training to servers will help them navigate each type of situation when dealing with customers;
• Assurance: this dimension measures the knowledge, trust and confidence employees showcase when talking to customers. A good example of this is training employees on menu knowledge, allowing them to experience each dish, so they can make helpful recommendations;
• Empathy: is about the restaurant’s capability of understanding customer needs and catering to them. You can take advantage of restaurant data to understand what your customers want on the menu and modify it to increase the number of orders.

Use the tips provided above on how to improve restaurant service quality to create a top-notch experience at your food business. The more loyal customers you have, the more secure your revenue will be for years to come.