Know-How Exchange : Strategy

First, they most certainly do control how many people come in daily. They are your front line. If they do not deliver a great customer experience-- you won't have repeat customers.

An easy incentive is to stop pooling tips. Let them get the reward they earned and the customer intended them to have.

If you insist on pooling tips-- have incentives/goals based on add ons. It won't be based on # of people who come in-- but by the # that are there. Like who might (by suggestive selling) sell the most of a featured dessert or appetizer. Then create incentives based on team performance. Explain they do control who comes in the room by their performance and repeat customers. Restaurant chains where there aren't much in tips or ability to bring in clients (fast food) pay incentives on revenue goals-- so can you.

Carol - Thanks for your suggestions. Since service is shared, we don't know who suggested the extra dessert or who sold the extra teapot or loose leaf tea so it's tough to incent individually. My dilemma is, we should average a certain revenue number or customers or revenue/customer a day. I figure I should not incent on any day that we don't meet those numbers and if one day is up and another down, it makes no sense for me to incent on the up days when the down days are grim. I can set a monthly number and incent on that number only. Variations per day are just too difficult to quantify if everyone is working hard to give that customer a memorable experience. And they do. Further thoughts?

SageHill: Yes, we have a loyalty program and an enrollment form. Given that the person ringing them up is usually the one signing them up, it's an automatic gimme because they're already there. We do very well on this and being a small store, customers love it. Again, the person who may have mentioned it to the customer is not necessarily the one actually signing them up.

You can also still run spiffs for selling x# of featured desserts or other item-- the team vs any individual.

There are so many suggestions here. One thing is certain in Marketing, research is key. Having your customers evaluate your performance with a brief non intrusive survey (no more than 5 question survey) on the grade of service on a particular evening is crucial to determining the effectiveness of staff teams. You can have the submitted survey go in for a chance to win a gift basket of tea. The incentive is there for the customers to participate and having an incentive for the team with the best evaluations is key too.

You can have all servers vote an extra share to the one employee who worked hardest.
Example: you have 10 servers. Divide tips into 11 and the 11th share goes to the best server as determined by blind voting.

Not perfect, but it's a start...and your servers might come up with ways of perfecting it.

Michaell

Objective: Increase revenue

Sources:
1) Suggestive Selling (cross, up-sell etc.),
2) Customer Loyalty Program (surveys, incentives etc),
3) More Word of Mouth.

Role of Servers, Measurement and Incentive:
1) Suggestive Selling (cross, up-sell etc.) - Definite role of servers. Let them compete, Measure by dividing the total 24 tables into x no. of parts based on y servers you have so lets say 4 servers then 6 tables per server(one server only serves these 6 tables). The group of tables performing best in terms of revenue on a monthly/weekly/daily becomes the Star of the day/week/month.

2) Customer Loyalty Program (surveys, incentives etc) -
Get servers to promote the schemes, surveys and who attended your table column...this way on one hand you have got the customer engaged in a conversation and feels more comfortable and on other hand the server's skills to promote customer loyalty comes handy and you get more revenue.

3) More Word of Mouth - This is your marketing effort. You can promote by making your staff spread the word. Making people write reviews about the same and driving your staff to collect feedback etc from your customers.

Regards,
Sachin

Have you asked your staff what motivates them? If you want to know what will work, talk to the people involved. Have a meeting and brainstorm. You may be pleasantly surprised at what they suggest.