The hospitality industry, including catering, has people at its core. The most successful hospitality businesses make providing top-notch customer service their highest priority. Hospitality guests can overlook minor mistakes in food orders or presentation; however, when customer service is lacking, you have a much higher hurdle to overcome. Problems in service can be diminished and even eliminated through focused employee training. An effective training program centers on ensuring your employees have what they need to offer high levels of customer service.

Safety

To adequately address safety, a training objective might be: To make the hospitality operation a safe place for both employees and guests. Training to achieve this objective includes educating your employees in accident prevention and safety measures, including food safety. You even might provide instruction in CPR and other lifesaving techniques. Your staff members should become adept at looking for, and correcting, any potentially unsafe conditions.

Employee Satisfaction

Keep your employees motivated to continue providing quality customer service by providing them with the means to be happy with their work. A relevant training objective could be stated as: to increase worker satisfaction. Your training program could approach this issue by engaging your employees in discussions to determine what elicits job fulfillment. Subsequently, you can create opportunities to facilitate that state. An important positive benefit of keeping your employees happy is a reduction in turnover costs.

Develop Skills

Your employees need to be armed with a full array of functioning customer service tools if they are expected to operate at an elevated level. A training objective to cover this aim might be: to provide the knowledge and skill levels necessary to perform assigned job positions. Training in this discipline includes having employees shadow more experienced staff members and providing ample opportunities for gaining personal experience, such as allowing your trainees to serve co-workers at an internal luncheon.

Higher Performance Levels

If your employees are to exceed at sustained customer service, your training program should advance ways to extract the highest performance levels from them. A training objective stating your intention to do so could be: to increase skill levels and performance abilities. Affording your employees frequent opportunities for gaining experience enables them to develop their service skills. Some direct consequences of training for higher employee performance include increased productivity, improved labor proficiency and greater development and promotional opportunities.