Creating a mission statement for a restaurant should hinge on one very important fact that some restauranteurs fail to remember: the restaurant business is part of the hospitality industry, and so, the customer experience must come before everything else. Hospitality is about taking care of people, and that is integral to the success of any restaurant.
“Restaurant brands are a cornerstone of the average American’s daily life. They help create shared experiences among family, friends, and colleagues. With this shared experience comes an inherent level of trust, comfort, and a need for reliability. A restaurant’s operations need to reflect its willingness to be trusted, and these operations should be grounded in a sound mission statement,” writes Nathan Libbey for Nation’s Restaurant News’s (NRN) Speakerbox. Dr. Nathan Libbey is an Instructional Associate at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, with over two decades of experience in academia, industry, and technology.
Libbey formulated his opinion on a research study he conducted. “For this study, we looked at leading QSR brands’ mission statements and their performance across a variety of customer surveys. To be included, all restaurants must have been rated on these three sources: Chatmeter 2024 QSR Reputation Rating, Brightlocal’s analysis of Google reviews, and the American Customer Satisfaction Index. There are 19 restaurants that appear on all three lists.”
The survey focused on four key elements: food quality, market leadership, customer service, and community (environment). He explains further: “Taking a deeper look into these themes, Quality focus represents the largest category (31.6%) of mission statements, followed by Customer/Service (26.3%), with Market Leadership and Environment/Community each representing 21.1%. QSR brands, at present, are most likely to emphasize the quality of their food, although this is not aligned with the evolution of mission statements from operational focus to CSR-related focus (Environmental/Community is the smallest bucket).”
Unsurprisingly, the results show that restaurants with a higher focus on customer service ranked best. “Customer Service-focused missions significantly outperform all others, suggesting that how food is delivered matters more than what is delivered. Despite representing only 26.3% of companies’ missions, these guest-centric statements correlate with the highest customer satisfaction. The missions themselves seem to indicate an investment in the people who serve those who gather to enjoy food and beverage, and this service focus delivers well above average satisfaction ratings.”
At National Restaurant Consultants, we begin with the customer experience. Customer experience is what informs menu engineering, efficient operations, and marketing. It is important to consider the employee experience alongside the customer experience—this is part of that “people centric” approach to business that is crucial to hospitality-based business.
Richard Weil, the owner and principal of National Restaurant Consultants (NRC), has spent decades prescribing to hundreds of operators and at dozens of speaking engagements relating to customer service experience. “The guest experience starts with putting a smile on to your guests, from the beginning of their engagement, even with the drive-up window. Customers are looking for hospitality within every category of the industry. ‘Look at me, smile at me, talk to me, and thank me,’ are words to live by in every operation. This not only includes the front-facing customer interactions, but also the internal workings of every operation from back to front.”
Let NRC help you and hour operation to be able to adapt and adopt these principles and move your operation to the front of the class.