Time To Engage

If the customers want to leave more money on the table, then why is the industry allowing them to walk out the door?

- Peter Pysk

Your last customer may have easily earned you a million. Perhaps even two. But the chance passed you by all because you didn’t care. Restaurants are guilty of letting profitable opportunities walk out the door. And it is because there’s a lack of good service.

Here’s a breakdown.

Seventy percent of customers do not know what they will order when they go to an F&B establishment. That is a 70 percent chance of getting an extra P100 to P200 per person in added sales. The average small café would have 10 occupied tables per meal period and two meal periods per day. Let’s say that each table has three customers on it, making that 60 customers in total for the two meal periods. If the staff could get each customer to just spend an extra P100 each over a 360-day year (allow five days of closure) that would amount to an extra P2.1 million in revenue.

How to go about it? Simple. Provide service and make sure your team has the tools (knowledge) to enhance your customers’ experience. If you can develop a culture in your team where all your employees are engaged and are service-minded then this should be easy. It is what we call in the industry “suggestive selling.” Many will use the term upselling but, personally, I don’t like this word as it teaches your team to force a sale rather than listen, analyze, and suggest something to a customer that might enhance his experience.