Hotel F&B: How to save your department north of 20 000$.

Here's your weekend reading. Hotel F&B can be more than simply one of your hotel's amenities. If anything, wouldn't you like to find out how you can save 20 000$ with somethings simple as a chatbot? Learn how you can leverage automation to increase your restaurants' bottom line. Enjoy the weekend!

Online customer service is often overlooked by restaurant management. Brushed off as superfluous and easily compensated for, it doesn’t place itself as a priority amongst other more seemingly pressing matters such as:

• Staff training.
• Implementing a strong service sequence.
• Or even making sure everyone showed up for their shift and you won’t have to start calling people to come in 1 hour before service.

A manager constantly solving issues left and right on the floor will put answering all the emails at the very bottom of his list of priorities and will rather have the hostesses helping set up the dining room or attending other tasks rather than attending the telephone.

Even though hotel F&B has the additional support of middle management, the array of daily issues makes for a good reason to place emails at the bottom of the list of shared responsibilities by managers, Maitre D’s, and directors.

To this day, we've collectively agreed this being acceptable, pending everything else is taken care of.

Nevertheless, we can all agree that the disregard of the pre-arrival steps which should always be included in the service sequence can have dire consequences on the outcome of your service.

In this edition of “Serving the Industry” I’ll breakdown the current state of customer service to better understand the nature of the issue, as well as the consequences so we might have a better view of the full extent of the problem. Finally, I’ll provide you with my usual insight on how automation can be leveraged as a turnkey solution.

For those of you who are reading our newsletter for the first time: Welcome!

Thank you very much for taking the time to read this article. I look forward to sharing my thoughts with you all.

I’m leveraging nearly a decade-long experience in the restaurant industry and my ever-growing quest for knowledge regarding AI, as well as a collegiate diploma in restaurant management to present you this article.

The current state of online customer service

"Feeling as though it’s out of their control, many restaurant operators feel as though they simply don’t have the resources to guarantee the upholding of standards during this part of the service sequence."

Prioritizing tasks based on the perceived easiness with which you can make up for them being ignored will ultimately lead to the need to do just that. Constantly making up for previous mistakes, constantly finding solutions and mitigating the consequences of your previous decisions.

Contrary to proactively ensuring that your standard for online customer service is persistently being upheld, waiting until the guests arrive to consider them as customers will very often start off the experience on the wrong foot.

Due to a staff shortage and a structure based solely on the guest’s experience in-house, delayed responses and frustrated customers are the expected norm during busier parts of the year.

Unfortunately, this means that multiple guest experiences are tainted from the get-go in much higher proportion during the most anticipated period of the year. And since the overall customer rate is infinitely higher during those periods of the year, compensating for mistakes becomes that much more difficult.

Furthermore, feeling as though it’s out of their control, many restaurant operators feel as though they simply don’t have the resources to guarantee the upholding of standards during this part of the service sequence.

How this is impacting operations

Even though the cause being constantly overlooked, the consequences of poor online customer service has led to the following:

1. Customers opting for other restaurants.This really does happen. Customers will send out emails, messages or make phone calls to multiple restaurants just to make sure they get a reservation somewhere/anywhere. Failing to answer in a timely manner gives them the opportunity to keep browsing and opt for the restaurant that beat will you to the punch. Unfortunately, customers aren’t becoming more patient with time. Quite the opposite.
2. Revenue lossIf somehow the response time to their inquiry was slow, but yet quicker than the competition, customers will end up in your restaurant. But not as the ideal customer. They’ll arrive as an unhappy customer. Anyone who’s worked in the industry knows that the unhappy customer spends less and won’t think twice before leaving a peppered review online overexaggerating every minute unsatisfactory detail of their experience. Until we can breakdown the reputation platform’s algorithm’s, it’s imperative we do everything possible to collect the best reviews possible. But more importantly that we avoid those horrible 1-star bashes.
3. Increased CostsThe uphill battle to win over customers after they've been led to feel like their needs weren’t attended to is often fought with discounts and free items or drinks. Paired with the disruption caused to the service that's multiplied by all the tables that end up being affected throughout service.
4. Brand reputationEvery interaction after the customer walks in unhappy can lead to negative reviews online. Drowning away constant good reviews earned over time and earning your restaurant the reputation of “that restaurant you can’t get a reservation at”. As you've most certainly come to realize: a single bad review can outweigh ten-fold the amount of 5-star reviews.During peak season this is most definitely the lastt of your worries. Your full already. But when fall starts coming around the corner, perhaps that reputation isn’t the best to have.
5. Increase of employee stressDealing with unhappy customers takes a toll on any person, even your most seasoned waiters and managers. Furthermore, a single table that takes longer as they have complaints can unravel the neatly crossed thread of service and impact every other table in that waiter’s section. Over a given lapse of time your staff will frown upon the very idea of coming into work. The effects felt by your staff will transfer on to your floor managers, and ultimately on to you as well.

Automation as a solution

Automation can’t solve every problem in your operations. But when implemented correctly it can help alleviate specific pain points having a trickle-down effect on multiple aspects of your operations.

In this article, I illustrated the ripple effect that negative online experiences could have on customers once they arrived on site.

However, the same opposite effect will be felt in a much more positive way throughout the guest experience, after having offered optimized online service with an automated agent (chatbot).

What’s to gain?

1. An increase in customer satisfaction.The main objective of automation is the increase in customer satisfaction. Often wanting someone to give them the answers to their questions over having to look for them on your website, customers will call or send an email after checking your website for a total of 3 seconds without finding the answer to their question. You can think of a chatbot as a way for your customers to collect information on your website without having to make the effort to navigate the page. Your customers will be glad they can seamlessly find the information they’re looking for without having to think.Furthermore, if 75% of inquiries are removed from their daily tasks you can double the time your coordinator or directors can spend on other requests. Thus, allowing them to improve the quality of their service and make sure that the other 25% of inquiries are met with the kind of service that leads to those guests arriving happier as-well. Happy customers are customers who spend more.
2. Cost-savingsThe most noteworthy advantage will be the savings you will make. Most hotels have a coordinator or a designated employee for online customer service. Overtime notwithstanding, that employee most likely works 40-hours a week. Now the entry-level rate for this job is about 20$CAD/h (Salary: Food And Beverage Coordinator in Canada 2023 | Glassdoor). Out of their 8 hours per day spent on the clock, let's assume that they spend 5 hours on online inquiries and the rest on other tasks they’ve been assigned. Keeping in mind that 75% of those requests are FAQ type that can be answered by a chatbot: your staff is spending 3.75 hours daily answering inquiries that can easily be delegated to a chatbot. Now let’s do some simple math:3.75 hours per day, 5 days a week = 18.75 hours a week.This is costing you 20$/h x 18.75 hours. That’s 375$ weekly. Over a month it’s 1 500$.Over a year it’s 18 000$.
3. More cost savingsFurthermore, once your telephone stops ringing so intensely, you might only need 2 hostesses during your evening shift, as opposed to 3 or even 4.Which will improve your daily labor productivity and improve your bottom line.

Day-to-day

But how will that affect the marketing and sales directors, the F&B directors, and GMs of AI-Solution’s audience?

Imagine coming in early to work as you probably always do. No doubt, you have meetings scheduled for the better part of the day. You have until 9am to get all your deep work done before your staff starts coming in. That’s assuming your breakfast staff is solid or your front-desk team is solid or even that you don’t have meetings scheduled that early. As you sit down, at your desk you probably check the sales numbers or other stats you check every morning once more, after having checked them on your phone.

You’ve now gathered the courage to check your emails. Your 500+ unread emails are just pilling up. Most of them don’t merit your attention. But within the slew of service providers pitching their new products, the 10 different daily reports to read, the directors of other departments already sending you emails you need to look out for the customers who’ve somehow managed to reach your inbox to get that reservation. Or even worse, the customer complaints about the unreasonable response time for their request that has now been forwarded to you, by your boss.

You already know that leaving at 5pm is wishful thinking, even though you’ve been in since 7am.

But hey, you wanted this job. Right?

Instead of sharpening your ax, as you fume reading the rest of your emails and preparing the daggering questions for the moment your coordinator walks in: imagine never having to worry about this exact situation ever again.

Giving your staff the tools to answer all questions adequately within a reasonable delay can impact your day as well.

?The consequences of not automating

The consequences of disregarding automation will come progressively.

• First, you and your team will need to keep spending precious time on online customer service.
• Second, the cost of this task will pile up.
• Third, over time your reputation will decrease while other restaurants utilizing AI will gain their customer’s trust. And ultimately your customers as well.

Instead, look at all the positive improvements automation can bring:

·??????? Up to 30% increases of your conversion rates.

·??????? The instant responses your customers want.

·??????? 18 000$ savings per year.

·??????? A more flexible schedule.

·??????? Increased productivity.

·??????? Better work culture.

Conclusion

We’ve covered a lot in this article: the problems you face while tackling online customer service, the consequences of not addressing these challenges adequately, a solution and the choices to be made.

AI-Solution can help you learn more about the benefits of automation and AI.

In a world where we are all accustomed to finding answers to our questions as quickly as we can ask ChatGPT or look them up on google, and where the online customer experience can be the difference between success and failure, can you afford to overlook quality of online customer service any longer?

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Article written by: Louis-Gabriel Lafontaine-Hebert

Co-founder, AI-Solution

10/08/2023