Day in the Life: keeping up standards

All-day opening presents some challenges you may not have anticipated. You may have your staff rotas going like clockwork, for instance, but are you sure your levels of customer service are consistently high whatever the time of day?

Research last year among consumers, carried out by marketing consultancy HIM, revealed a steady decline in satisfaction among people shopping, from morning to afternoon to evening.

Satisfaction ratings fell not only for speed of service and staff friendliness but for the value for money people thought they were getting - even when the prices hadn't changed.

"It goes to show that staff have a direct impact on the value or price image of their store," comments HIM director Tom Fender. "They have just as much impact as head office colleagues who are responsible for pricing policy."

He adds: "This is what happens in retail, could it also happen in pubs and bars? People say the on-trade is different to retail. I bet there are far more similarities than differences."

Tim Bird, who has specialised in operations and staff motivation for several pub companies including Greenalls, Morrells of Oxford and Eldridge Pope, agrees that pubs face a similar

challenge to shops in maintaining customer service levels through the day. "Surprisingly, you tend to find that customer service is better during the busier sessions," he says. "I have always got higher scores from mystery visits at weekend evenings than at weekday lunchtimes.

"Pub staff will always tell you they love being busy. If they're busy they're focused, but when it's quiet they can become distracted and aren't as attentive to customers.

"Managers might take that time off, too, so they aren't as well supervised. There might be something, too, in the body's cycles. We all tend to go into a bit of a slump after about 3pm and then pick up again after 5pm, when we've had something to eat."

As Tim points out, this wasn't a problem when pubs used to close in the afternoons, and a lot of publicans might be happy to keep it quiet before revving up again for the evening session.

But you can also see your quieter trading times as the best opportunities for growth. "When staff are under pressure there's little time for the niceities," says Tim. "But when it's quiet they should have time to sell more to those customers who do come in.

"Why not focus on trading up in the afternoons? You might even be able to bring in table service."

The key is to keep staff motivated. Good training certainly helps but there are also incentives you can devise that can keep your people on their toes, even when you aren't there.

EPoS data now makes it possible, for instance, to know what the pub took on weekday afternoon shifts a year ago, and you can simply incentivise staff by giving them a target to hit that tops that figure.

In Tim's experience such incentives work. "You have got to set your people a challenge," he says.