I don't think I have ever written about it but one of the many things that I have done for work since moving to Asia nearly 20 years ago is that at one point in time I owned 2 restaurants. These were tiny establishments with the largest one being one that only had 7 tables in it. We were frequently packed and got to the point at one time where we had to start reserving tables for people because we were immensely popular.
Did we have the best food in town? No, we were above average but since I myself am not a good cook I couldn't exactly do very much to improve that. I am more like a producer that can't actually play any instruments but knows what sounds good. That is how I handled that management of both of my restaurants.
There were some tiny things that I gathered from my many years of working in the food-service industry as a teen and into my 20's that transitioned into me being aware of certain tiny things that actually mean a lot as far as keeping customers happy is concerned though and most of this came not from ownership but from being a customer at a ton of restaurants in my years.
These little things might seem trivial, but they really do stick out in my mind and it was at lunch today at a new restaurant that I came, one again, to the conclusion that most small restaurant owners / managers/ staff are absolutely terrible at getting these very simple aspects of customer service correct. When I ran my own business I made it a point to train my staff to getting these things correct all the time and perhaps, just maybe, this is the reason why my tiny little restaurant was able to do so much better than places that were significantly nicer and sometimes had foreign chefs at them.
Allow me to let you in on a couple of these secrets that aren't really secrets but make a huge difference in keeping customers happy and therefore, a customer that you are going to see again in the future.
Acknowledge the customer as they sit down, even if you are busy
Perhaps you have seen the above image before and no, that is not from my restaurant. I am sure that many of you out there have wandered into a self-seating restaurant and just sat there for ages as you see staff member after staff member pretend that they do not see you and just ignore you. I've worked in very busy restaurants and you would be surprised how far a "hello" or "welcome, I'll be with you in just a minute, really busy" or something along those lines goes. There are times when my restaurant was very busy and it was difficult for us to provide immediate service to people but I made it a point that my staff would always greet customers, even if they just did the dick move of sitting down at a table that is dirty and covered in dishes.
By the way if you are ever in a place that has dirty dishes all over the table and perhaps food on the floor, you are making the entire process take LONGER by sitting down at said table. We get it, you want to eat, we want to serve you,... but if you get in the way the entire process will take more time. Just stand near the table to mark your territory.
Now before I get off topic here too much, I required my staff to at least say hello to anyone that sat down, even if they were in the process of carrying food or drinks to another table. Most people are going to understand that you can't immediately tend to them but it is appreciated and reassuring when you let someone know that "yes, we know you are here, we will get to you as soon as we can." It's such a simple thing to do yet many of the places in SE Asia you basically have to shout at someone to get them to serve you something. I blame smartphones to some degree for this problem.
Fix your damn wobbling tables!
You ever sat down at a table and the legs don't all hit the floor and now you have this teeter-totter of a table that if anyone leans on the table it is going to spill everyone's drinks? Yeah, well I would say that 50% of the tables in every single restaurant in Da Nang is like this.
As the owner / manager of a place you need to do whatever is necessary to prevent this. In this country, the idea that the entire floor of your seating area is going to be perfectly flat is a pipe dream. Construction simply doesn't work like that here so whether it is by purchasing tables that have adjustable legs or putting napkins or beer coasters under the guilty legs... DO IT!
When I walk into a restaurant that is 50% wobbly tables and the staff are all standing around not doing anything it says to me that they know the tables are like this, they just don't care enough to do anything about it. If this lack of care takes place in the seating area, how much care do you think goes into the places that you can't see, like, I dunno, the kitchen?
It's so easy to solve this problem but almost nobody does anything about it. It's just lazy and it only takes 30 seconds to rectify it.
Take away dishes when people are done
This happens so rarely in Vietnam / Thailand / Malaysia that I am impressed whenever it happens. Normally you have to be somewhere quite upmarket for it to happen at all. Most low to mid-range places, once they bring you your food they are basically done with you until you ask for the check. As I am sure many of you have done in the past, sometimes I like to stick around and maybe have a few more drinks with my friend after I have eaten but I am NOT going to do so if the staff care so little about us that they are going to have us sit there with piles of dishes in front of us that we are clearly finished with.
When I trained my staff about taking away plates when customers are done they acted surprised like "why would you do that?" When I explained that people will order more things if they feel comfortable they did what I asked and voila! People actually did order more drinks and coffee and things like that when they were finished. IF you leave them there surrounded by plates they are going to just want to get out of there.
This is not a difficult thing to do but man oh man is it rare in SE Asia.
Never EVER, serve a warm beer
If you didn't remember to stock up the fridge the night before with a lot of beer then I can safely say that your restaurant isn't going to make it. Beverages and beer in particular, are the biggest money makers for any restaurant and the staff and owners have to do so very little in order to be able to serve this. In my restaurants the things we made the LEAST amount of money on was the food... The drinks were where the real profit was to the point where on Fridays we had a free buffet to anyone that had 3 or more beers. It worked and we made a ton of money in the meantime.
I have been to a lot of restaurants in both Thailand and Vietnam. I would say that it is upwards of 50% of the time that I am served a beer that has either been in the fridge for just an hour or so and isn't cold enough or in worse situations I am served a beer that has clearly never seen the inside of a fridge or cooler filled with ice. What sort of numbskull serves a room-temperature beer and expects the customer to be ok with that? I always return the beer and sometimes the server acts confused as to why I am doing this? Who the hell wants a warm beer? I don't think you need to have a masters degree in F&B to realize this yet so many places have substandard temps on their drinks. Some places continue to operate with a poorly functioning fridge and it just isn't a priority to them to get it fixed.
I have seen multiple bars go under in Da Nang because word gets around really fast if a place is trying to pass on warm or not cold enough beers. I will admit that some places serve beer with ice by default and that is the way that those bars are and you either drink beer with ice in those places or you don't go to those places. This is fine because such establishments don't even have electricity and you know what you are getting yourself into. I'm talking about places that definitely DO have loads of fridges but they just have such incompetent staff that they either forget to put the beers in them early on in the day (or better yet, before closing the night before) or they simply don't care. In either case, these places will not see me as a return customer.
To those of you out there that have never been to a developing country, these notions probably seem completely absurd and you would never encounter them but it is extremely common here in Vietnam as well as the rest of SE Asia. In small establishments, these same businesses almost always go in and out of business very quickly. It is alarming to me that the people who own them seem to be so confused as to why it is happening.
There are some restaurants here in my neighborhood that people go to regularly despite the fact that the food is no different than anywhere else. The food isn't even that special. However, they do correct all the things that I have spoken about above though and this is the reason why they succeed.
Being a business consultant over here in tourism would probably be pretty easy but customer service is very different here than in the west and while I do not think that everything in the west is "better" than over here, I do think that in this particular niche market, that the western idea of all of this is vastly superior. The places that manage to build this into the business model over here almost always succeed and well, I just think it is silly that the other ones don't take notice and adapt as well. It's so simple!