Insights
Christmas and New Year are understandably busy times in the hospitality industry with people socialising more with family, friends and work colleagues.
We have taken at look at the impact Christmas and New Year had on our clients at different stages of their guest journey compared to the rest of year.
We hope you find this interesting.
When compared to the average benchmark score over the year, we saw five categories Behaviours, Organisation, Pace, Knowledge and Appearance drop below the average in December.
These are not surprising – with trade levels much higher you could expect the pace of service to slow down, for the team members to be under more pressure or appear more stressed and for the cleanliness of the restaurant to potentially suffer.
Interestingly, although Selling remained the lowest scoring benchmark, it was up in December on the yearly average, indicating that although teams were busier, they were selling to your guests more effectively.
The biggest increase when compared to the averages was Conversation which was an incredible 14.2% up on average when compared to the rest of the year.
During the festive season guests are often more willing to open up and engage in conversation, this combined with teams having an obvious topic of conversation to start (“So what are your plans for Christmas?” or “Any big plans for NYE?”) means conversation is flowing.
While Christmas and New Year create the perfect environment for conversation to flow it seems that after this time conversation starts to dip and from April to October remains low until festivities begin again.
When we compare the conversation score with NPS Scores, it is no coincidence to see that when the conversation score increases, generally so does the NPS.
So, allowing your teams the opportunity to spend time with your guests and encouraging them to engage in conversation can make the difference between your guests being ‘passive’ visitors or ‘active’ promotors of your business.
All benchmark data is collected from HGEM clients who subscribe to Operational Assessments (Mystery Visits) or Guest Perception Surveys. NPS is based on HGEM clients only.
