Quality is something that is hard to define because if you ask ten people they will give you ten different answers. This article will be focusing on why quality is so important in the restaurant industry. Restaurants need to realize that the quality of their product and service are being evaluated every day by every customer. Every customer evaluates the quality of the product/service on each and every visit. Therefore you can only achieve the best quality possible if you focus on it all the time. The purpose of this article is to look at what quality is in the restaurant business and why improving the quality is a never-ending process.
As I stated earlier quality is very hard to define because every person has a different definition or view of what the quality of the product or service should be. Take the saying beauty is in the eye of the beholder and substitute quality for beauty. The definition of quality in the restaurant is different for every guest and changes on every visit. Every restaurant wants to meet or exceed the guest’s standards on every visit but that is nearly impossible. Why is that you ask? It is because the guest’s standards are always changing. That is one of the reasons why it is a never ending process to improve quality. As we strive to improve the quality of the product by raising standards and implementing new policies our customers realize this and their perceptions of quality also rise. This is why it is impossible to be perfect and why we always have to work on getting better. Every guest has a different expectation and that is why it might be very easy to win a new customer over, but why it might be hard to keep them down the road if you do not work on getting better.
Besides the quality of food in the restaurant business our quality of service impacts how the guests rate our quality as much if not more than our food. You can serve the best food in the world but a poor server can ruin the guests experience and your reputation. That is why training and proper hiring selections are so critical in the restaurant business. Proper training will help to make sure that the needs of the guests will be met. Sometimes it does not matter what we do because it will not be enough, but if we show that we are trying other guests will take notice. For example if a customer has had a rough day it will be much harder to make them feel that we have given them our best. These are situations where we must make sure that we are going the second mile for that customer. We cannot help their situations outside of our walls but we can make sure that while they are a guest they receive our best efforts.
The restaurant business is very unique because we are not just selling a product or providing a service we are selling an experience, and it doesn’t matter if it’s a fast food chain or a fine dining restaurant it is still an experience. If you give a great experience you will bring guests back time and time again, and each visit will help to build an emotional connection with your guest. That is why you see more and more restaurants having activities for children like a family night or having a mother and son night out. Depending on the type of restaurant you run will help a guest decide what level of service that they are expecting but every guest will be looking for some type of experience.
Quality is either a hit or a miss with every guest and it is everyone’s job in the restaurant to ensure a guest has a great experience. That is why quality is a never ending process. There is always another guest that has never been to the restaurant and he/she might need something totally different then the next person. Just like quality is a never ending process so is training and selection of staff. By building a staff that has learned that good is not good enough you will create a culture of constant improvement and that will lead to success. The restaurant business is very intense and there is so much competition in every sector of the industry and perceived quality from the guest’s eyes determines who succeeds.