Say hello, don’t wave goodbye

We had Sunday lunch in the beer garden a few weeks ago. It is a pub we have been to before and we know how the system works. We ordered our food, got our number and told them where we were sitting. Unfortunately, the waitress was new and not very confident, she did not like shouting out the order number and if she could not immediately find your table she returned to the kitchen.

This resulted in our food being delayed until someone else could bring it out and shout our number loud enough for us to hear. It was not the end of the world, as the food was still warm and we all know what it is like to be new to a situation. In fact, we started to talk about when we were the newbie and some of the mistakes we had made. But it did get me thinking about how we greet our customers in the practice. How we let them know about the ‘system’ and how it impacts on our bottom line.