Staff training = guest trust = better sales

When Alicia Rogers was serving at age 20, a table asked her what White Zinfandel they served. She froze—she had no idea. In that instant the guest lost trust in her.

That's obviously not an ideal feeling for anybody involved.

After that experience she knew she needed to know more to be an effective server and thus establish guest trust, so she started developing some tricks and strategies to make sure that'd be the case.

Here are some of those tips and strategies that Alicia—now a manager—teaches at her bar:

• List specials in a separate section on the menu, and instruct servers and bartenders to literally point guests to that section when they drop menus.
• Commit to memory a couple kinds of each common beer style so you can quickly answer when somebody asks "what IPAs do you have?"
• If that’s too much, use the rule of 3. Be able to name 1. a beer that recently tapped, 2. a beer that’s selling well, and 3. a beer you like. This proves to customers that you know your stuff.
• Keep a whiteboard in the server station where you can list things that are new, remind servers about specials, or anything else.
• Hold a staff meeting when the cocktail menu turns over so you can go over it, provide tasters, etc.
• If a customer’s having trouble, ask them what they like when they go to other restaurants. If they’re able to describe it, you'll hopefully connect the dots to something similar on your menu.

Check out the interview clip for more info and background from Alicia:

❓ Why?

Because there are QR Menu flows that suck and actually make things worse for customers.

To be clear, we're talking here about the experience of what happens once a customer scans a QR code. I.e. you can have a bad QR Menu experience even if everything pre-scan is great (you have enough codes, staff is good about introducing them, etc.).

Here are the 3 biggest offenders of a bad post-scan QR Menu experience:

1. Customers are brought to a PDF. Hands down this one's the worst. PDFs are hard for customers to deal with because in order to enlarge the menu (almost always necessary on a phone), they have to pinch to zoom. This is tough to do, especially for folks on the less-tech-savvy end of things. It just so happens these are the same people for whom enlarging is most important.
2. The menu doesn't include item descriptions. It's tough to stay on top of website content, so businesses just include item names rather than researching, vetting, and pasting in item descriptions. This means the menu doesn't do any salesmanship work. As with a paper menu, it's best practice to include descriptions for everything you sell.
   
3. The menu doesn't include all items. Similar to the last one, but even more egregious. Updating website content can be time consuming, so instead of having to update every time a beer or cocktail changes, folks just say something like "Ask your server about our rotating drafts."

All of these harm sales because it makes the ordering process harder. Best case scenario it takes longer to decide what to order. Worst case customers just don't want to deal with the QR Menu at all. Which, depending on your service setup, can really throw a wrench into things.

❓ How to do it?

You could create and stay on top of a manual QR Menu experience. Here's what that could look like:

1. Create a menu page on your website. Most website builders offer an easy-to-use and professional-looking menu template that allows you to avoid using a PDF, meaning your menu will be mobile-friendly.
2. Add your menu content. Be sure to include all your menu items and descriptions.
3. Grab the URL from that page and create a QR Code for it. There are many options for this. Here's one.
4. Distribute your QR Code everywhere in your business and train servers and bartenders on introducing it to guests.
5. Every time your menu changes, go to your website and make the updates. You don't want the menu to be outdated, and you want to make sure you're including everything on your menu, including descriptions.

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