A Great Guest Experience Starts with Your StaffA Great Guest Experience Starts with Your Staff

Today’s consumers are prioritizing experience over everything, meaning global foodservice brands can no longer turn a blind eye to initiatives like guest experience, loyalty programs, and staff engagement. In fact, experience has become so important that a study conducted by Deloitte showed 60% of restaurant guests think a positive experience will result in them returning more frequently.

The challenge? Menus, branding, design, and advertising can only go so far. Guests are looking to be delighted once they walk in the door, leaving the majority of their experience up to your staff.

We now live in a world where restaurant guests are more knowledgeable than ever - entering restaurants inspired to try that new menu item or review they’ve seen online. Yet, the reality is, marketing tactics for consumers often outpace internal communications with employees, creating a knowledge gap between the consumer and frontline staff. Brands that recognize this disconnect, and ensure staff have the necessary information to do an exceptional job, will end up being more capable of delivering a memorable guest experience across their operations.

Compass Group, a leading foodservice and support services company, began seeking a digital solution for communicating with their frontline that would help ensure exceptional service delivery. An interview with Jugveer Randhawa, VP Technology Delivery at Compass Digital Labs, characterized the challenge with the question, “how do we reach 32,000 employees who don’t have corporate emails, communicate with them and instruct them on what to do?”

Many organizations, like Compass Group, are managing multiple restaurant brands and have large, fragmented workforces with employees who are often part-time or seasonal hires. With this organizational structure, it’s no wonder why it has become a challenge to deliver a consistent and notable guest experience. Organizations who place priority on putting the right communication tools and strategy in place will reap the benefits of having restaurant staff who are in-the-know and ready to take action.

Let’s continue with our Compass Group example. With thousands of foodservice locations, including Tim Horton’s, Starbucks, and Subway, they decided to partner with Nudge Rewards to launch an employee app across their frontline workforce. By leveraging mobile devices, they were able to increase their reach from unit managers to all frontline staff – getting critical information into the hands that matter most.

Mobile tools, such as employee apps with news feeds, chat, and forums, offer an effective channel for reaching frontline staff - but implementing them is only the first step. Figuring out how to best leverage an employee app to drive performance is the key to success. Imagine you’re trying to improve average check size across all units. How are you going to communicate with and mobilize your teams around this initiative? To develop a culture of selling across your restaurant staff, it’s important to engage, educate, and reward all employees for taking part in campaigns.

Using an employee app as the hub for frontline communications, Compass Group delivered interactive messages about sales objectives, including tips for upselling or promoting the special of the day. In doing so, they were able to help all associates feel involved and excited about the task at hand. “We had a 7% sales lift, just from instructing them properly. With Nudge, we were able to quantify what our goal - a 4% increase in average check size - meant to the people actually working with and talking to our customers,” said Randhawa.

The lesson? If you’re looking to create a consistent and memorable guest experience across your brand, you should focus on empowering your restaurant staff to do so. The next generation of restaurant staff will no longer look to email newsletters, bulletins, and training manuals to get work-related information. They have similar expectations to consumers, and are craving digital touchpoints to assist them throughout their workday. Implementing a mobile solution that can help educate, train, and ultimately reward your staff is the first step in getting there.