Customer complaints are the most underutilized resource in the hospitality industry today, said Andrew Schmidt in the white paper "How To Use Customer Complaints to Your Advantage."
Restaurant operators need to train their staff to see such complaints as opportunities and how to effectively deal with unhappy customers, he said.
Jay Goltz, in the You're the Boss/The Art of Running a Small Business blog in The New York Times, uses the S.A.V.E. approach to train his staff. The approach includes the following steps:
- Sympathize. Letting the customer know you understand his feelings can be calming.
- Act. Let the customer know you will do something solve the problem with a specific action.
- Vindicate. Let the customer know that the incident is out of the ordinary and not acceptable.
- Eat something. Give them a free menu item or discount as an apology.
From You're the Boss:
"Customers did not give you money to get bad service. Many times it is appropriate to give them something. A restaurant might offer a free dessert, another company could offer free delivery or a discount. It costs a lot to find a new customer; it is certainly worth something to keep an existing one."
