Sponsored by Wisely
A lot is converging in the restaurant industry right now. After a year-plus of pandemic-imposed shutdowns, people are flocking back to restaurants to dine in-person, while demand for curbside pickup and delivery orders remains sky-high.
It’s great news for embattled restaurants, but a labor shortage threatens the path forward. With so many restaurants simultaneously reopening across the country, there has been a surge in demand for workers. And yet, operators of all types are struggling to staff up.
The reasons for the labor shortage are manifold and complex. Some former restaurant workers have cited concerns about exposure to COVID-19, job insecurity, lack of child care, low pay, and losing unemployment benefits—or a combination of factors—in their decision not to return to the industry.
In an effort to win back workers and attract new employees, some brands like McDonald’s, Chipotle, Jimmy John’s, and TGI Fridays, are increasing wages, offering hiring bonuses, and reassessing benefits.
While those moves are important—restaurants should do whatever they need to in order to retain more staff—there will always be some employee turnover. That’s just the nature of business. And so, brands should also be looking for solutions to streamline operations, eliminate tedious tasks, increase efficiency, and ultimately, boost employee morale and the overall guest experience. Here are a few specific ideas:
1. Provide a consistent guest experience
Restaurant brands need to ensure that guest relationships aren’t entirely dependent on individual employees. Instead, every guest should feel a strong connection to the brand as a whole. That way, when staff turnover occurs, customers keep coming back.
One of the best ways to create sustainable relationships with customers is by providing a consistent guest experience. In order to do that effectively, brands need an institutional memory rooted in customer data.
Coffee
Take a coffee shop, for example. Baristas often drive repeat guest visits by memorizing customers’ names, drink orders, and personal anecdotes to make guests feel special. Brands like Starbucks create an institutional memory with guest data, so that any team member—regardless of who’s on duty—can deliver the same level of personalized service that customers expect and appreciate.
Fast Casual
At a fast casual brand like California Fish Grill, software powered by guest data enables team members to reward and further incentivize high-value customers by acknowledging who they are, thanking them for their repeat business, and even doing something special, like upgrading their meal. By providing the general manager at each location with this intel, fast casual brands can stand out from the crowd through next-level service.
Full Service
In full service, a restaurant table management system can tell team members everything they need to know about each customer just before they walk in the door. Imagine having the ability to recognize regulars upon arrival or know who’s behind each curbside order—regardless of who’s working the host stand. When guest data is readily accessible at every interaction, restaurants have the opportunity to tailor every individual’s dining experience to their personal preferences and behavior, and foster loyalty.
Don’t let your information about your most valuable guests live and die with individual team members.
2. Let software do the monotonous stuff
Software can bring value to restaurants in two high-level ways: First, by enabling staff to focus on what they do best. Second, by eliminating busy work.
Focus on what matters
The most important job of a restaurant host is actively engaging with guests. But it’s nearly impossible to be fully present when the restaurant gets busy and you’re juggling multiple parties—on- and off-premise.
Restaurant software can enable staff to focus on what matters: making a personal connection with guests and not having to worry about things like overbooking, no-shows, waitlist abandoners, or endless phone calls.
Eliminate busy work
Software can also eliminate busy work that slows down the team. For instance, when restaurants enter call-in orders into a POS that’s integrated with Order Management, they can turn multiple follow-up calls (i.e. “I’m here for my order” or “Your order is ready”) into texts that are triggered instantly.
Tools like remote waitlist and reservations, table and order management, automated guest communication (i.e. SMS), and automated list grooming can significantly reduce the amount of manual tracking, phone calls, guesswork, and friction, especially during peak times when every minute counts.
When evaluating tech solutions, it’s important to note the number of on-screen taps, how user-friendly the interface is, and automated configuration capabilities so your hosts can stay focused on guests.
3. Identify Top Team Members—And How To Keep Them
The goal of any restaurant is not to make money, but rather to find and keep customers. Whether you’re a coffee chain, or a full-service restaurant, one of the most important drivers of customer retention and frequency is your staff.
Historically, however, there hasn’t been a quantitative way to figure out who’s driving the most repeats. With a fully integrated tech stack that unifies traditionally siloed data across restaurant systems, operators can easily identify which employees drive the most repeat guest visits.
This intel is especially key to brands that apply the Customer Lifetime Value metric—the estimated profit generated from each individual customer from the first visit through the last—to operations, marketing, and business decisions. When operators know exactly where and why high-value guests spend money, they can use this information to determine staffing, wages, training, and beyond.
Additionally, once restaurants know exactly who their top-performing employees are, they can make a conscious effort to ensure those individuals stay happy and motivated through recognition and incentives.
Think of it this way: Would you pay $25 an hour if a server drove 95% of their customers to come back for another visit?
4. Associate Feedback with Specific Team Members
Given that every dining experience is unique, guest feedback is essential to understanding what’s working and what isn’t—from the food to customer service. The best way to capture those insights and make them actionable is by automating text or email surveys that route guest feedback directly into a connected restaurant CRM.
This automation makes guest feedback accessible to each member of the team so that everyone knows how to enhance the experience the next time the customer comes in. It can tell brands which employees, or aspects of operations in general, drive high customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Plus, the leadership team will receive this information in regular reporting (i.e. daily email summary) to course correct if necessary. This qualitative data can then be leveraged in staffing, wages, and training, as well as employee recognition and retention efforts.
Restaurant sentiment analysis goes a step further by enabling brands to harness third-party reviews across channels to track customer satisfaction trends and correlate it with guest service.
5. Rethink the Traditional Service Model
If staffing continues to be an issue, restaurants with tech-savvy guests may decide to forgo the traditional service model altogether. bartaco, for example, transitioned from servers having sections to a new service model featuring food runners and QR codes.
At the restaurant, guests scan a QR code to view the menu, order, and eventually pay—all from their table. Essentially, your phone is your server and food runners bring whatever you ordered directly to you. Guests can keep the check open and continue adding items until they’re finished and ready to pay.
The bartaco service model offers a nearly contactless dining experience and enables managers to go around and personally greet guests. Then, at the end of the night, the restaurant pools tips so that every member of the team is equally compensated for their hard work (in states where permitted).
While this group service model may not work for every restaurant, bartaco shaved 5-6 percentage points off its labor pre-pandemic and ran 30 percent store-level EBITDA, despite being down 20-25 percent in sales, year-over-year. The average income of employees is between $23-$25 an hour, including dishwashers.
The new model has become a cornerstone of the brand’s experience-oriented culture and has boosted team morale according to its leadership team.
Next Steps
In order to get through this labor shortage unscathed, restaurant brands need to think critically about how they attract and retain employees. First and foremost, that means reviewing staff wages, benefits, and overall satisfaction. But it would be a mistake to overlook the many ways that technology can support restaurant operations—particularly when you’re shorthanded.
With an integrated tech stack, operators can create an institutional memory with guest data, increase efficiency, automate tedious tasks, personalize the dining experience, recognize employees who drive repeat visits, and spend more time delighting guests.
