If it’s your first time here, welcome! Over the past number of weeks we’ve been sharing with our readers some insights into automation in businesses. Whether you have a small business or are running a larger organisation we believe these points can be helpful for all. We’ve been talking about how to leverage automation in business for a number of weeks, and we hope it’s been beneficial reading. Feel free to give us some feedback in the comments field down the bottom of this post!
So far in this series we’ve covered how automation can save you time, and discussed how automating certain processes can streamline your business operations, and more recently we’ve learnt that up-selling chilled mineral water might bring in some great profits. But that’s not going to revolutionise your company, or is it?
Working in one restaurant business definitely helps with making sure all wait staff ask the same questions. In the chilled mineral water example, there were only two alternatives; regular tap or mineral, for your customers to choose from. Seems quite achievable so far for anyone to implement!
How do you apply that same concept with your entire menu? Is there a special formula that makes a customer want to buy the most profitable item on the menu? Probably not. But we’d like to give your diners a great experience either way. You want them to come back right?
- Know your costing. How much does it cost to make and what profit does each sale make? Without this, how will you know what dish returns the highest profit.
- Make sure your staff know what to say – write a script – to up-sell more fluently. Maybe that means a short paragraph including specials of the day, or Chef’s special. No, this doesn’t mean long drawn out monologues… they need to be short “digest-able” sentences that flow easily allowing the customer to think about it and proceed in a relatively short amount of time.
- Repeat – Repeat – Repeat. Don’t forget that dining usually include more than one course, so this process can be applied across the entire menu, dessert and drinks included!
Voila! By taking the time to do some cost analysis and extended staff training that introduces standard processes, you have immediately grown your profit potential!
The process remains the same – the difference here is that you are changing the content to suit the situation:
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[accordion_block title=”Diners take their seat”]
Staff offer Diners Tap or Chilled Mineral Water
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[accordion_block title=”Staff hand Diners the Menu”]
Staff verbally present the Specials of the day – Soup of the day – Chef’s choice etc
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[accordion_block title=”Diners place their order”]
Diners are shown the wine list and Staff present the latest ‘Popular Wine’
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[accordion_block title=”Diners have finished their mains”]
Staff to deliver a short sentence about the desert menu and tea or coffee
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Have a look around and see what processes are the same in your workplace, but just repeated with different content to suit the various situations?
