I work at Firebirds Wood Fired Grill as a hostess, and I LOVE my job. However, one of the problems that I found is most predominant and causes the servers the most stress revolves around something called the Firebirds Inner Circle. This is a subscription-based club, where people join our mailing list and get coupons and birthday specials, and other things like that. The servers are supposed to ask each table they wait on if they would like this handout for Firebirds Inner Circle, where they fill out their information and get coupons and other deals like that. However, the servers hate doing this. They think it is tacky and doesn’t fit with our most upscale themed restaurant. Because of this, most servers don’t ask people to fill out this handout. The problem is that each server has a monthly quota of forms they have to have filled out, so servers end up coming up with fake names and email addresses on the last day of the month and just filling out their own Inner Circle sheets.
I think, ultimately, this is a sales issue, and a problem with people having a skewed perspective. The Inner Circle really is a benefit to customers who want to save money and know what our specials are and things like that. While this is probably not for everyone because some people just don’t come to our restaurant enough, there are other people who spend over $1000 at our restaurant each month and could really benefit from this service. I think it would help the servers if they realized that they don’t need to be pushy and sell this service to everyone, but it could help someone. After waiting on people a couple times, you can kind of tell that they come to your restaurant often and you know a little bit about them. Especially for these people, I think the servers can try harder to sell them on the idea of joining the inner circle.
BoweryJE22
This is interesting. in the fact that they are forced to come up with a certain amount of people that they have to get to sign up. It is like the concept of elasticity and having everyone fulfilling a sales role within a business instead of only having a specific branch for sales.
It’s interesting that you have a monthly quota to meet for sign-ups. This does not seem like a good management tactic because having fake emails is worse than having none at all. Maybe a better tactic is having a benefit for the servers that do get sign-ups. Then there is more of an incentive to at least mention it to the table, much like commission is for outside sales salespeople.