To be successful in the hospitality industry, you need to keep your customers happy. A smile might go a long way, but well-trained staff, providing great service, go some way further.
AdaptiveU can help you with everything from onboarding to practical training. Make sure your customers keep on coming back for more.
Reduce employee turnover: Help new hires to swim, not sink
The hospitality industry is built on high-quality customer service. So why wouldn’t you train your staff to deal with customers from their first day on the job?
You know the story. A venue ‘hires’ a new staff member, only to have them work a shift, unpaid and with no prior training. They want to see if potential have what it takes to survive in the role. Without committing to a contract, of course.
“Staging”, as it’s often called, is still commonplace in the US, especially among restaurant owners.
It’s seen as a way to separate the wheat from the chaff. But this kind of sink-or-swim onboarding is one of the reasons there’s such high staff turnover in the industry.
With AdaptiveU, your new hires will be focused on customer service from minute one. Create onboarding “universities” and invite them to join. That way they have a baseline of knowledge when they arrive.
Build a “Customer Service 101” course, and receive notifications on their progress.
AdaptiveU also supports video. It’s a great way to introduce newbies to practical tasks before they’re thrown in at the deep end.
Always improving your customer service, anywhere
More and more people are using searching online to learn how to prepare food and drinks. Why not for work too?
Channels like Tasty, The Tipsy Bartender, and Spoon University are some of the most popular on the internet. If you haven’t heard of them, there’s every chance your team have. Tasty, the food arm of Buzzfeed, gets around 1.8 billion views a month on Facebook alone.
The key to the success of this format is its simplicity. Their short, to-the-point, ‘how to’ videos encourage inclusivity, using POV camera angles and unshowy recipes to make viewers think: “Hey, I could do that”. Don’t you want your hospitality staff to feel the same way about their training?
AdaptiveU can harness the power of this format for your business. Take ‘How-to’ videos from platforms like Youtube and Vimeo and add them to your universities, to help your team learn practical tasks: how to steam milk for coffee, or how to mix a mojito.
Better yet, create your own content to make sure your team know how to do things the way you like them done.
Your staff are more likely to learn, and provide a higher quality of service, if they’re already familiar with the tools. AdaptiveU makes that possible.
Flexible training options: No more dreaded training days
Nobody wants to do training on their day off. You might think that’s stating the obvious, and you’d be right.
Your staff probably love the flexibility of working in hospitality, where shift patterns and downtime change every week.
According to caterer.com, the hospitality recruitment site, avoiding the 9-5 grind is one of the top reasons people work in the industry in the first place.
There’s a lot to be said for that kind of variety, but when it comes to staff training, it can be hard to find a time that suits everyone. It usually ends up with you having to drag somebody in on their day off.
Sure, you might pay them, but who wants an hour’s wage when they could be enjoying a well-earned break? Training days are designed to help your business perform, but this won’t do much for your team’s morale.
Banish the dreaded training day from the calendar with AdaptiveU. It’s a platform which supports continual learning, so your team can pick up new techniques and skills on an ongoing basis, rather than whenever you can convince them to come in outside opening hours.
Generate login details for everyone, so they can access training materials from anywhere with wifi, and use your admin rights to track progress and make sure they’re completing the challenges you set.
Well trained staff means great customer service
Nothing says “great customer service” quite like happy staff.
