Tuesday January25, 2005

By Alazar Ahmed

alazarahmed@yahoo.com

Ignorant Kingdoms

 It was 8:00 PM, dinnertime after an exhaustive day of work. You rush into a restaurant and realize that the waiters are sluggish and arrogant. To the extreme, you see them exchange nasty words with customers and one of them wrestles with the later fiercely. Guess who settles the disagreement- customers and other waiters. Then you see a ‘come again’ sign at the bottom end of the menu. Would you do it? If you do and see the same waiters again, what would you feel? However exceptionally delicious dishes or burgers the restaurant serves, you take it as a stereotype of abandoned businesses with narrow-minded focus on snatching money with no concern for customer satisfaction. In such conditions, it is hardly possible to say that ‘the customer is the king.’

This is not the only example. There are lots of restaurants, cafés, and pizza spots, with good product but poor services. Even the majority of them fix their eyes more on upgrading the architectural beauty of the restaurants. Whenever they close for long periods, their reason is not to improve their services rather it is to redesign and beautify the dead walls. In contrast, some other bistros control waiters’ movements and reaction of customers just in their eyes. What do customers desire? It is too general and hard to answer. But there are some common rationales that most customers share in common. And the owner should clearly comprehend those key success factors. The firmaments of success do not disregard keeping the quality of products. But they also focus on the way the services are given. And this article is specifically written to owners’ of the aforementioned businesses.

Timeliness

When a customer orders a cup of tea or a bottle of soft drink or something to eat, it usually takes more than ten minutes. A customer swears that this is not his kind of place. The most important thing is that waiters should be on time and active all day and night. The reason for being late in serving might be boredom or tiresomeness. This cannot be taken as a persuasive reason as long as there is a way to solve it out. Like shift catering. In other cases, the services given by some places are late because of lack of limited capital items such as limited cooking machineries. There is still a solution for this. Engage in acquisition, if good customer service is really meant. Whatever reasons are there, sort out mechanisms to avoid late services before they end up turning away customers.

Welcoming but not sneaky

It is quite obvious that recreational sites should be sincerely welcoming to customers. No frowning faces around customers. A customer visits your service owing to social factors. Some might be in quarrel with somebody at the workplace or home. Some come to refresh themselves. Others are show up for different reasons. In such conditions, a waiter should be quite friendly with no expression of discontentment. Sometimes waiters give wrong or unwanted comments in the middle of customers’ discussions. In the other case, they display sarcastic looks if the idea, which a customer discusses, is against their view. In all conditions, a customer might not always be right. However waiters should never react to customers’ actions or words.

Non-discrimination

It is vivid in the minds of most of my readers that recreation services are categorized into outdoor and indoor for a convenient provision of a satisfactory service. Such services, however, could lead to discrimination. In the restaurant mentioned at the first paragraph, waiters rush or prefer to serve outdoor customers. Oh! Tip might be the motive for their quick service. Anyway, a customer might see waiters in the vehicles of outdoor customers. I think such things are under the control of the owner or manager. Waiters should be refrained from happy-go-lucky moves. And we as customer have to demand fast and good mannered services at any spot and time.

Recreation as well as resort

What does a customer look for in the restaurant or any recreation spot? The answer is simple- refreshment. Nobody pays money for a cup of tea knowing that it is a 98% profit and that it is the same tea as the one s/he can get at home. A customer goes to a restaurant or a recreation center for refreshment or just as a gesture of social interactivity. Thus, such businesses are expected to be catalytic than disruptive. What is the point in running such businesses that offend customers who come with their money looking for good services?

Qualified personnel

Restaurants or espresso bars should know whom to hire and, due the long process, whom to fire too regardless of socialization and cohabitation motives. The eatery or café is famous in stable human turnover. Meaning, the rate of firing or resigning is by far low no matter how notorious a waiter is. What normally should be understood is a waiter is paid as long as there are visiting customers. The logic might work out also for the existence of the business itself. So what? So, managers should think about all the possible measurements of keeping the quality of their human inventory as they care for the quality of their tangible tasty edibles.

Stewardship

In most local recreation spots, the warding of owners is completely shared with either the superintendent or all waiters with no delegation of responsibility to a specific waiter. Owners might be out of Ethiopia or enjoying life in Addis, while their waiters are ruining their sources of money. Culture of stewardship is not quite common here. The reason might be the nature of the business. An owner might feel tired and even bored by sitting fourteen hours or more in a day. But it should be done. That is how success is achieved.

Owners and managers could be in or out of town. It doesn’t matter as long as the hotel or restaurant is well structured. A professional hotel management has a structure ready to assign somebody as head over the other employees. In so doing, a spirit of ownership can be inculcated in the minds of all employees. On top of that, a little incentive could do miracles. More importantly, all kinds of refreshment spots and restaurant services should concentrate on how to ensure that the customer is satisfied and entertained. Only then could the customer be called a king.