Focus on the Focus Group Surveys

How are your hotel F&B operations measuring up to your competitors’ newly designed (or retrofitted) restaurant?

How is your chef monitoring the quality of the meals served? Do your staff have the appropriate training for upselling new products? Do you utilize social media to monitor complaints and provide a quick response time to improve your PR issues?

Too many questions on your plate? Too many cooks in the kitchen? Where’s management when you need them?

Suggest you seek a competent professional hotel and restaurant advisory group with relevant credentials in your region. They will serve your specific needs to improve your operations with an unbiased opinion. These advisors are trained in the hospitality field and recognize many symptomatic issues where failures may occur if intervention does not take place.

The regimen may require a focus group (composed of past and present clients to your facility) to discern ongoing problems. They may also become a sounding board on what expectations this focus group may have for best-case scenarios and suggestions for improvements on service, quality of food served, timeliness of orders taken, and general observations.

For the focus group there should ideally be about 10 sessions with 10-12 individuals invited to attend, following the same scripted agenda by the advisory panel for each set. This allows a consistent and fluid response to the Q&A session. Hypothetical scenarios may be posed so that the advisors can task the calibre of responses and seek various solutions where they may be required. Generally, follow-up surveys will be sent to past and present regulars (especially business groups utilizing your restaurant) with submitted anonymous responses. Analysis of these survey responses will provide a pattern of issues to be addressed, or expand on if they have been well received.

Improving on your operations may not necessarily be as simple as creating a seasonal, trend-setting menu, but your operations would certainly benefit by your receptivity to having an experienced observation team quantify your operations with their professional recommendation.

You will have an appropriate advantage over your competitors if you focus on the focus group surveys. Demand to be the best and demonstrate your willingness to change for the best and experience improvement in your F&B operations.