Bar Service and Business #4

Bar Service and Business #4

Remember team, this is a graduating process… so, if there are no customers to be served, the customer area is tidy, and your area is tidy… what’s next?

Part 4 – Keep on top of glassware

In a “behind the bar” situation, being able to put your hands straight onto clean (hopefully chilled) glassware – usually without even looking – is crucial to customer service times.  When a glass gets used, that means there is one less glass behind the bar and one more out in the customer area.

That glass needs to come back to be washed, sterilised, and put back in a rack where someone else can seemingly unconsciously put their hands straight onto it to serve the next customer in the most efficient way.

In a business environment, this could mean a number of things. I can relate directly to the Finance Industry for instance where I believe this is very big.  In this world of the Paper War, there is seemingly forms for EVERYTHING for our clients to fill in.  Therefore making sure there is ample stock of these, neatly stacked somewhere accessible is imperative. Nothing looks less classy than a professional person pulling out boxes of papers – usually along with many expletives – trying to find something that should have been readily on hand!

In a retail situation this could mean the bags/boxes/gift wrapping you provide to the customer to carry away their exciting new purchases.  Do you have a good stock of them in a handy place so the bagging/wrapping can happen in an efficient manner without the customer standing there too long?

Another thing about the paperwork point above… just as the used glass has to return to the bar to be “processed”, so do the forms our clients fill out.  What systems do you have in place to make sure the client – who more often than not comes home, throws the form on top of all the other things they need to do and forget about it – gets the form back, completed properly and in a timely manner?

Hopefully more here to think about than you thought there might be!  Next week’s is a logical progression from here.  I’ll be in touch then once I’ve got this paperwork sorted…