How to Use Restaurant Staff to Communicate Value to Patrons?
Restaurant staff should be considered as the back-bone to any venue when it comes to contributing to success.
When you’re trying to create brand recognition and awareness for restaurants, there are quite a few factors to consider.
Business owners have to think about visibility across print and digital mediums like the website, social media networks, flyers, or brochures.
It’s essential to communicate the brand values with elements such as the logo design, icons or shapes, and colors.
Another very important thing to keep in mind is the restaurant staff through which you can convey the right message to patrons.
Before anything else, focus on creating an effective strategy for marketing and promotion.
This makes it easier to increase familiarity and convince patrons to keep returning.
Your employees can play a huge role in communicating value and building brand loyalty as well.
If you are wondering how to use restaurant staff to make an impact on the patrons, here are a few ways to try.
How you can use restaurant staff to communicate value to patrons:
1. Align your brand strategy
2. Offer employee rewards
3. Establish a trustworthy brand
4. Employee reviews
5. Include staff in promotional content
6. Get more customer reviews via your staff
1. Align your brand strategy
Mostly, businesses are likely to external branding and communicate with potential customers.
However, it is also very important to pay attention to the internal work culture and maintain consistency with branding.
This is where you need to align your strategy and make sure that your restaurant staff understands the message you want to send clearly.
It is crucial that the employees know the brand’s values and can promote them among patrons.
Interact with them regularly and find out what the staff thinks about the franchise or business.
Once you have an idea of how people perceive the brand internally, you can clarify any confusion and define core values.
By aligning both strategies, restaurants can create a positive work environment and use their staff to effectively communicate the right message.
2. Offer employee rewards
You might find this surprising but it can work very well for keeping the employees motivated and interested in promoting the brand.
Offer rewards and additional benefits to staff members who can engage potential customers and convey the brand values effectively.
Today, employees can leverage social media platforms and create various types of content to promote the restaurant.
Create a rewards program for your staff to encourage them and make your employees feel valued.
In the end, this can boost recognition and make it easier for you to attract a wider audience as well.
With user-generated content, employees might be able to communicate value to patrons easily and create a positive perception of the brand as well.
3. Establish a trustworthy brand
One of the most important factors to keep in mind here is your brand image and identity.
Before you start looking for ways to use your restaurant staff to convey value, it is essential to build or establish credibility and offer a great customer experience.
You want to create a brand that your employees or staff want to be associated with and promote it across digital or print mediums.
This is where design elements can also make a lasting impact.
If you think about it, staff uniforms have the logo, tagline if there is one and usually come in brand colors as well.
These factors are important for creating awareness and communicating value to patrons.
When employees trust your brand and believe in the message, they might be motivated to promote the mission on social media networks, blogs, or in print too.
4. Employee reviews
Many businesses ask for feedback from employees or get them to leave honest reviews on various websites about their experiences.
By doing so, you can make your restaurant stand out among the competitors and generate positive word of mouth as well.
This is also a good way to find out what staff members think of your brand. Encourage them to fill out employee surveys and questionnaires about their experience at the restaurant.
It can help you gain their trust and align your brand values accordingly. At the end, this could inspire confidence among staff members who may leave an impressive review or feedback.
5. Include staff in promotional content
Whether you are creating videos or posting images on social media, try including your employees in the promotions.
This can help you make a good impression on patrons and communicate value effectively.
Get your employees to talk about the restaurant and its unique factor.
It is also a great way to earn the trust of employees and make them feel valued.
6. Get more customer reviews via your staff
Whether you like it or not we do live in a review society, where buying choices are largely determined by the number of ratings and reviews a business has.
This is especially true in the restaurant industry.
Getting reviews on Google, Tripadvisor and Yelp is incredibly important for your future review.
And getting more reviews comes largely down to your staff.
Not only are people more likely to leave a review when they’ve had excellent customer service, but you can use your staff to ensure you’re getting hundreds of reviews every day.
Our favourite technique is to incentivise your staff to ask customers for a review at the end of the meal. If they get mentioned in the review personally then they can earn rewards whether financial or different prizes.
They can simply hand one of the members of the table a slip with a QR code that takes people directly to leave a review on e.g. Google.
Then simply saying, ‘please pass this around the table, we’d really appreciate it’ – means you can get lots of reviews from one table.
Reviews on Google for example determine where you rank on Google, so it’s incredibly important.
Summing up
These are some ways that you can use restaurant staff to communicate value to patrons.
It is incredibly important to build a brand that employees want to be associated with and promote as well.
So define your goals and mission clearly so that the staff understands what message you want to send to potential customers.