I recently had the worst dining experience in my life. Can you guess why? No, not because of the food. Yes, because of the service! MY GOODNESS, what awful service. And, because the service was sooooo awful, I will never step foot in that restaurant again. I will not go into the details of the server’s lack of enthusiasm, politeness and general understanding of what makes the service industry tick. But what I will do is highlight a couple of key things that may be applicable to all businesses.OK, what is this restaurant doing wrong?

#1 - Obviously, not training their staff properly. This staff member had no clue about the importance of providing the highest quality service possible. Proper training requires the proper training materials: training manuals, guides, posters, refresher meetings, hand-outs, tests and more. Yes this takes time to implement, but without these materials customers will not get the service required to keep them coming back for more. And, without repeat-customers, that business is going to have to implement an awful lot of marketing.  

#2 - Not measuring customer satisfaction. The restaurant management team has no idea how awful my experience was, why it was so awful and that I will never give them my business again. If a small satisfaction survey was sitting on the table, or was attached to my bill, I would have happily let management know how I was feeling and what I thought about their training program. This type of information is priceless. Management can use it positively to prevent this level of service quality if future. Can you imagine how many people that server “ticked-off” that day, that week, that month?

What are your thoughts? How else can a business avoid delivering appalling service?  

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Everyone always asks, “How on earth can PKG write a manual for MY company?” Well, here it is ladies and gentlemen…our process for writing a manual.  Essentially, we initiate every new “manual writing” project (be it a training manual, policy manual, operations manual, etc.) with a study of the entire scope of the job…dissect it, envision the end result, and come up with an internal plan. We will then provide a timeline and a quote for the first draft of the manual.  Once the project commences, we’ll first seek to gain an in-depth understanding of your company, your culture and your goals for the manual. Depending on your company’s size and on project size, we will perform an interview or series of interviews, assemble the data and work with your team or senior management to determine best practices.  During interviews, we will ask some key questions including how you break down the various tasks so that we can help you define the details of each task. Or, we may record different scenarios while we watch your staff is in action so that we can help you determine the breakdown of each task (or topic area in the manual).   Once best practices or best processes are established, we will develop a manual outline and begin to organize all of the pertinent information we’ve collected.  Depending on the nature of the manual, it may require diagrams, scripts, checklists, and so forth. Depending on budget, these items will be created for you or we will recommend that you create these items in-house. It is our goal to make the manual as user friendly as possible! BECAUSE, what’s the point in having a manual if nobody wants to read it? Therefore, we’ll translate all technical terms and acronyms and use clear, concise language that appeals to your business’ culture. Depending on budget and purpose, your manual may be delivered in PDF form, or can be printed and bound. Finally, we recommend a manual re-visit three months after it’s put into practice. A re-visit will help ensure all processes are running at maximum efficiency. As the world changes, people change and technology changes; the most successful firms will readily adapt to these changes. The best way to adapt is to analyze current processes, the internal and external environment and to identify areas for process improvement.

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