“It has been and continues to be, our responsibility to fill the earth with the light and warmth of hospitality.” — Conrad Hilton, founder of Hilton Hotels
By now you’re aware of the measures designed to keep everyone safe, deliver an enjoyable experience and kickstart the hospitality industry. Once you’ve fully reopened there may be areas of the business that need reassessing to ensure you’re completely ready for customers and employees.
We have created this guide to ensure the smooth reopening of your business and highlight some considerations for short and long-term success.
Manage The Risk
Now that customers are back through the doors and creating the buzz that makes the hospitality atmosphere thrive, can you ensure the safety of customers when they dine and drink with you?
Steps you can take: Review your outdoor spaces and experiment to really make the most of available pavements, patios and gardens. Digital signage can help point people in the right direction and promote those popular dishes and offers that will help push revenue forward. Ensure that procedures are in place for your front and back-of-house employees to prepare and serve food safely (mask). High footfall areas should be regularly assessed. Partition screens and sanitiser stations should be checked for correct positioning. If you are serving customers from a counter then food displays should be reviewed and updated to reduce risk but also highlight the best of your produce.
Make sure employees have easy access to either disposable face masks or face shields.
Communicate With Your Customers
When you have reopened continue to be vocal with your customers, explain how you are keeping things safe but still providing the experience that customers have missed and are yearning for. There may still be some apprehension from your customers about returning to indoor venues. Reassure them with regular social content highlighting the positives of hospitality opening back up and the precautions your business has put in place. This will keep the nerves at bay!
Communicating detailed information with your customers may boost your local search rankings and positively impact the perception of your brand.
Update Pricing & Review Offering
You will be affected by the introduction of new measures so it is essential that you adjust and tweak your wet and dry offerings to generate more turnover in a different climate. Make sure your food budget calculations are up to date. There may have been supplier increases that need to be factored into costings to ensure your business is achieving the margin it needs to thrive. Revisit trading data from the last two years to fully understand your best sellers and biggest contributors to GP.
If the premises need a refresh, Luminati offers a full range of menu holders, food screens and product displays that will help create a fresh and enticing atmosphere and help to push sales.
Cleaning Is Key
Ensure that cleaning policies are updated in the venue and retrain employees to ensure compliance with government guidelines. This should include extra focus being paid to high-contact surfaces such as handles, tabletops, menus and card machines. Tables should be thoroughly cleaned between sittings and hand sanitiser stations need to be readily available throughout the premises for employees and customers.
Is your hardware up to standard?
Everything in working order, connecting seamlessly and delivering a great experience for your customers? To meet the needs of the new era of hospitality you may like to review and update your digital signage. Let’s take a hotel for example.
When you first walk into a hotel what exactly are you looking for? First of all you want to check in…. is my room ready yet, where can I store my luggage, all questions that digital signage will help to answer in the future. The solutions we offer are perfect for a hotel network to:
- Display queue waiting times, room readiness, and entertainment options.
- Use ‘blank space’ for example in elevators to advertise spa offers, restaurants or anything else that may engage your audience and inspire them.
- Set up a virtual concierge, this will allow your guests to find out their own information and spend as long as they need researching great activities for that day, restaurant menus, bus and taxi routes.
- Update guests should there be a critical situation.
Your guests will be grateful to have all this information easily accessible.
Digital signage has long been filled with content people are not interested in, but with the addition of user-generated content it has the power to transform your venue. In bars, pubs and restaurants social media walls can be created to share customer testimonials, feedback, images and videos generated by your audience base.
Use these suggestions to help engage your customers and keep them safe. Rich visual content both digital and physical is key to enhancing customer experience and keeping them coming back for more.
Thanks for reading our blog,
