Bill Shirley Training has been operating for just over 18 years in the training and development sector of the hospitality industry. Drawing on my 34 years of extensive and varied industry experience helps me to bring a currency, perspective and freshness to hospitality training, assessing and staff development.
I love focusing on developing or revisiting systems and procedures, upgrading SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures) and creating customer service programs for all areas of the sector. I then roll these programs out with a hands-on approach by working closely with teams of staff and managers so that the programs become part of the businesses culture. On the job practical staff development is the key.
I, like all of you in this industry, have been and still am going through a very tough time in the midst of this global Covid-19 pandemic. The 23 March 2020 will burn a hole in our calendars as the day everything hit the stop button.
Since then you have had to find a new term to help you survive and that term is ‘pivoting’. To survive you needed to pivot your business to do more takeaway, home deliveries or pick-ups, develop online ordering pages on your web sites, change menus, keep suppliers happy, use you staff differently. You had to lay off staff or put them on JobKeeper if you could. If you are an independent small business you had to do rent and loan negotiations with the landlord and bank.
In a lot of cases pivoting wasn’t an option and you just had to close until, with fingers crossed and masks on, the number of Covid-19 cases dropped so you could re-open and hopefully survive.
All businesses which had re-opened now had to close again, Covid-19 numbers rose and then we went into Stage 4 lockdown on the 2 August, so no way of returning to Sydney unless I paid min $3000 to stay in a hotel for 14 days.
To be blunt, it’s been very challenging, mandatory masks on when outside and that won’t stop until the end of the year, only going for a walk or to the shops for 1-2 hours a day, curfews, Zoom/Teams meetings only and businesses are back doing the things I said before.
As I write, gradual re-opening is happening. However, I have seen many more ‘For Lease’ signs than in the first lockdown and it’s my observation, as we move further than 5 km from our homes, that some businesses don’t see the seating restrictions as a workable business model yet. So takeaway/home delivery is the chosen option.
Now, more than ever you have to deliver the best customer service you can. Your customers are nervous to return, they need reassurance that they are safe but they also want to see your smiling faces, eat and drink your delicious choices and have that human to human contact that they haven’t had.
Watching the celebrations of the gradual re-opening has been great to see. As I see it, a great opportunity to now utilise my experience to assist in developing and rolling out a customer service program that is specific to your business.
Let’s pivot to better customer service together, give me a call or send me an email and let’s rebuild this industry to have a better customer focus moving forward.
Hopefully I’ll be back in Sydney, early December to get you and your staff ready for Christmas.
Thanks for reading
