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That Tablet On The Table At Your Favorite Restaurant Is Hurting Your Waiter (buzzfeed.com)
In data-hungry, tech-happy chain restaurants, customers are rating their servers using tabletop tablets, not realizing those ratings can put jobs at risk, an investigation by BuzzFeed News has found. From the report: When the Smokey Bones restaurant in Dayton, Ohio, where Nicole Bishop waits tables introduced Ziosk tabletop tablets, she wasn't too worried about them. Ziosks are designed to increase restaurant efficiency by allowing customers to order drinks, appetizers, and desserts, and pay their bill from the table without talking to a server. But, as Bishop soon discovered, they also prompt customers to take a satisfaction survey at the end of every meal, the results of which are turned into a score that's used to evaluate the server's performance. One day not long after the Ziosks appeared, Bishop found that her work schedules had been cut short in half, a change she estimated would cost her between $200 and $400 a week. The report documents stories of several other waiters, all of whom have been affected by the tablet. It adds: Ziosk tablets sit atop dining tables at more than 4,500 restaurants across the United States -- including most Chili's and Olive Gardens, and many TGI Friday's and Red Robins. Competitor E La Carte's PrestoPrime tablets are in more than 1,800 restaurants, including most Applebee's. Tens of thousands of servers are being evaluated based on a tech-driven, data-oriented customer feedback system many say is both inaccurate and unfair. And few of the customers holding the reins are even aware their responses have any impact on how much servers earn.
Somehow ... that topic never comes up with wait staff when I go to restaurants.
What I hate is when they act like my fake friend and actually sit down at the table.
I want professional service. When I reach for my glass, it should never be empty.
If I start polite small talk then make polite small talk briefly but don't try to start it yourself.
"I hope you have a nice day/enjoy your meal/whatever" plays better than "Have a nice day, enjoy your meal whatever." One is your hope and the other is a command from you.
I tip well. At family owned restaurants I'm often offered off menu items and I even tip at buffets $1 despite the fact that I get my own food and drink and it galls me.
I don't like absent service and I don't like overly familiar service.
I probably wouldn't like a server who wanted to discuss politics.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I travel to the UK occasionally and have to remind myself that gratuities are not a thing (and in some cases seen as a rude gesture) the theory being that the people who tend bar or serve food are paid adequately enough that they don't need any extra.
Here in Canada its generally accepted that you tip your server (most Interac machines even have built in tip percentiles) this is factored into the system, I read the other day that many systems also only let servers keep a portion of the tip they get and the rest goes into a pool for all servers. At this point I don't understand the system at all, pay people to work a difficult job that absolutely requires you to be "nice" to every asshole that walks off the street to ensure you get a gratuity so you can make a halfway decent wage. This is almost like haggling the bill (which I have seen in Europe oddly enough) the expectation is that my service was satisfactory enough for me to allow this person to work at a livable wage.
I think the problem compounds for chain restaurants that may be off the beaten trail, so if you happen to work at a heavily trafficked location you are gonna do pretty well but if you work at a low traffic location you might barely be scraping by despite getting an hourly wage - that's management sticking it to the servers for something they have little control over.
I dunno, to me the whole system sucks and should just go away. Pay servers a decent wage and throw tipping out the window.
crazy dynamite monkey
When I take my family out to eat I expect everybody to interact. That's part of why I'm taking them all out to begin with, that shit aint cheap.
I always move the stupid thing to another table before we sit down. Sometimes, the waitstaff will switch it back to my table after accepting our orders, like they are doing me a favor. It's funny, they always point it at the youngest person at my table, who is automatically going to search it for games, find them, and beg for the 2 bucks or whatever to play them instead of spend time with us on this expensive outing.
I get that some people like them. They appeal to young people. yadda yadda.
I wish they would ask if I wanted one. "OK! Table for 6, tablet or non?"
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
Unless there's some kind of systemic bias --- in what kind of customers someone gets (e.g. ratings are poorer at night)--- it should average out and you should be able to use an average of different customers' types of ratings to compare employees. I agree yes or no questions, and long form "please explain" have value *also* in teasing apart what the customer experience is actually like.
I have a hard time believing that though. You can't just remove one worker without replacing them with another or bumping someone else's hours up. It really doesn't matter what score a person gets as long as it's not the worst. If everyone gets a 5.0 and you're at a 4.8, then you're the lowest scoring person. If you've got a 3.0, but everyone else is in the 2's, then you're the best person there. Management isn't going to cut hours for someone with a 4.5 unless it's worse than everyone else, in which case can you blame them? If it was your business, wouldn't you want to give more customers the best experience possible?
Apparently you have never worked in a survey-based environment. On surveys, when rating someone 1 through 10, only 10 is acceptable to management. 1 through 9 is failure.
Aye. At the car dealership where I work, 9 is the same as zero on customer satisfaction surveys. Further, less than an 85% average score cuts your commission for all further sales until the average goes up. With an average of 10-12 new car sales per month (less than half of which fill out the surveys) one middling score can cut my income for several months.
The company has the system well rigged.