3 MAJOR PITFALLS TO AVOID WITH RESTAURANT CRM

So you’re ready to compile good, smart data about your guests. You’ve either signed up for Upserve already or you’re intellectually committed to launch your own restaurant CRM (customer relationship management) initiative and starting to kick the tires on solution providers. Congratulations.

Your head and heart are in the right place. Now it’s important to connect all the dots to make sure you get the most bang for your buck, while sidestepping frustration coming from your staff, and worse yet, fall short of meeting your customers’ expectations.

Let’s review the major pitfalls you’ll need to avoid in order to get the most from creating and digging into your guests’ profiles.

Pitfall #1: Not launching your CRM program well.

.Whatever tech tools you decide on, a well-though-out installation will pave the way to an awesome future for your restaurant — think through how you want to roll this out with your staff. You know them. You know your managers. Watch this short video on  Making the Switch to Upserve to hear how other restaurant owners smoothly transitioned to Upserve and started getting value from the CRM-enhanced data immediately.

Restaurant management solution in India

The insights on guests you’re going to immediately have access to will influence your way of thinking. Be proactive. Educate your staff at least to a minimal level on what you’re going to know about the business that you’ve never known before. Tell them what you hope to accomplish. Get them excited, but don’t oversell things, yet.

Let managers know your restaurant will have a way to  clearly identify your VIPs and you intend to adapt your thinking accordingly. A new emphasis on CRM will help you make great staff scheduling decisions, menu decisions, and marketing decisions. Let servers, hosts, and/or bartenders know that getting to know your guests is an important part of your restaurant going forward.

An informed staff means a staff that gets behind what you’re reaching for by initiating a restaurant CRM program. An uniformed staff, well, let’s just say they could undermine everything.

Pitfall #2: Not committing time to review your program regularly.

The notion of having one wonderful login to see broad data on your guests and see how your restaurant is truly performing, only to ignore it, seems crazy — and I don’t mean a bland Business Intelligence dashboard that merely spits out a lot of information. But it happens.

Your tomato prices triple. A manager quits. The icemaker goes down. All of these things are unplanned, urgent issues that demand your attention. Deal with them as they happen. But if you want restaurant transformation, you’ve got to be proactive and put first things first, too. You’ve got to set aside time each day or week to go through your reports and be decisive about what you glean from them.

Maybe it’s time to delegate more of the front-of-the-house activities for a short time while you get your head around your new reports and insights. The key isn’t to launch a program. It’s to run a smart program that improves your restaurant. That might well require a new approach to managing.

As restaurant coach  Donald Burns says, “You cannot expect to meet the challenges of today’s restaurant industry with yesterday’s tools and techniques and expect to be in business tomorrow.”

Pitfall #3: Not trusting your data.

A  recent Forbes study  that polled senior leaders with major brands on their use of data, gave us four categories of marketers: Laggards, Dabblers, Contenders, and Leaders. If you’re reading this, it’s likely that you’re either a Contender or Leader, but let’s not make too many assumptions here.

Opening a new restaurant in India

The Dabblers. You’re a Dabbler if you’re amassing powerful data…only to intermittently use it. Too many restaurant owners say ‘Yes’ to collecting great CRM (and other) data, but then ignore or discount the insights they gain, thinking their gut is more trustworthy. They then halfheartedly embrace the valuable insights they get, viewing them with a cynical eye based on nothing than pride.

I have seen this happen, folks. Set your ego aside and trust what the data tells you. Blend it with your experience — especially when it comes to people decisions, which need that safe blend 

3 REASONS WHY YOU SHOULD NEVER FUSE FAMILY AND BUSINESS IN A RESTAURANT

Despite families and businesses both being complicated separately, people consistently want to fuse the two.

This is an obvious recipe for disaster, but it can also be a unique opportunity for success.

Family members will have the same incentive to see the business do well. It only makes sense to hire them, right? However, this logic doesn’t carry over to all business types.

Specifically, restaurants are a unique niche. They often have different hours, special rules on employee conduct, and periods of fast-paced mania.

When combined with the complications of Restaurant Pos Software in India, this can turn any restaurant into an episode of reality television.

However, with the power of hindsight, I can tell you what pitfalls to look for. After eight years of working in my family’s pub and grill, I know that there are some industry-specific issues that need to be stopped before they can start.

1. You’re about to get really comfortable

Waiting tables is  one of the most stressful jobs,  even compared to high-stakes medical professions. It’s only natural that coworkers grow closer together after facing stressful situations. And, while this can strengthen your familial bond, it also encourages bonding between family members and other co-workers.

This can lead to some awkward situations: your brother is dating the bartender, who is your best friend’s cousin, who is upset with your mom because of what she said to you over text, but your boyfriend went through your phone and told the kitchen manager while they were prepping. Restaurant employees have a  reputation for hooking up with each other, so don’t be surprised when your daughter and the cook flirt heavily.

Furthermore, even if you’re prepared to see the food runner as your son’s girlfriend, are you prepared to see your son differently? When your family is at the restaurant, they are amongst coworkers and will behave accordingly.

At an office, this might mean they’re more reserved, but at a restaurant, this can mean quite the opposite. You will gain an insight on family members that you’ve likely never had before. Seeing your mom flirt with guys at the bar or hearing your dad joke around with the waitresses can be disconcerting at first.

You need to make some allowances here. Understand that in order to foster good coworker relationships, they can’t always be the daughter or dad that you know them as. It’s a strange situation that most families don’t have to deal with; not many parents share friends and coworkers with their children. But not accepting that they have their own relationships and have different facets to their personality than what they present to you can create tension, both within the family and the business.

Do not punish other employees for “encouraging” your little boy to act differently. There is a definite, not always morally righteous culture in restaurants, and you chose to allow your family to be a part of that. You’ll have to live with that choice and separate family and employee in your mind, even if they’re the same person in real life.

2. You may be working with family members who are unqualified

Only hire your family members if they are qualified, or at the very least prove that they can do the job. This can be difficult to execute, but it is especially important in a restaurant. Learning on the job might be more acceptable in other businesses, but the foodservice industry is a special case.

Your employees are constantly in contact with your customers, who aren’t always the most understanding. Sometimes you can excuse a charred steak or bad service on an employee’s first day, but not always. Every interaction with a customer is a representation of your brand. Obviously, there will be some mistakes, but those mistakes will only multiply if someone is unqualified.

This means that while Uncle George might be a great conversationalist, if he keeps messing up his mojito, then he might not be the best bartender. Just as you wouldn’t put yourself in a serving position if you can’t multitask, do your family and your business the same courtesy. I’m sure you love Uncle George, but your patrons will not be so understanding when they’re sucking shredded leaves through a straw. Unless your family has experience in the industry, don’t hire them without some serious consideration, or your business could suffer.

Rejecting family can be a hard conversation, but it’ll only be worse if you have to fire them later on. Then it’ll really get personal. If at all possible, find something else for them to do, so they can still feel useful.

3. It will consume your family

I’m sure that members of your family have other aspirations than working in a restaurant. Well, everyone should realize that it’s impossible not to be pulled into the madness. Of course, family members can pursue other careers and some will never even work in the restaurant itself. All the same, I guarantee you that you will all be consumed by it, more so than any other type of business.

This is just the nature of the foodservice industry; because you develop such a camaraderie with your coworkers, because your hours are backward from everyone else in the world, because no one else can understand how annoying the regular at table three is, an exclusive club will form around the restaurant. It will be 80 percent of what you talk about, if not more. Even the family members that don’t work there will be forced to take part in the daily drama, by virtue of being related to you. Your business will consume family functions.

You will need this support, seeing as  90 percent  of How to open a restaurant in India close within the first year, and the rest have an average lifespan of only five years. Extreme dedication can be a strength, but if your business does fail, this leaves your entire family vulnerable. You won’t have much else to lean on, if anything. A family-run business is a classic all or nothing venture, so be prepared to give 100 percent, because that’s what it will take.

All entrepreneurs know how much  starting a business  can rule your life, but restaurants take that to the next level. Your days will be less nine to five and more noon to 3 a.m. Every day is different; there is no getting in the groove in the foodservice industry. While there are some general rules (you’ll be dead on the 4th of July and slammed on St. Patrick’s Day), you can never know for certain. Some Friday nights will be like a ghost town, and the next Tuesday lunch will be chaos.

Additionally, there are several interconnecting parts of a restaurant that can each have their own problems. The dishwasher behind the bar broke, so they have to bring glassware to the back, which slows down the replacement of clean plates on the line, so cooks can’t pass food off to the servers, and people have to wait longer for their meals.

Oh, and a twenty-person baseball team just walked through the door, wondering if you can accommodate them without a reservation; the new girl is covering someone’s shift, but she doesn’t know table numbers yet; someone knocked over a glass, so the table is standing in the middle of the dining room, waiting for someone to wipe down their root-beer-ridden chairs.

This is the exact sort of mayhem that happens daily, and you want to add all the complications that come with family?