Licensees have been advised to not get too bogged down by a high turnover of staff in the industry.
On-trade consultant for Diageo UK Matthew Guest explained the arts of expert service and marketing to ensure staff can maximise drink sales.
Guest champions ‘nudging’ — defined as “architecture that alters people’s behaviour in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives”.
It’s about promoting one drink and “creating a social norm”, he explained.
This can be achieved through careful menu design or staff training.
“Recommendations from the bartender alleviate choice overload by creating a default option from a trusted authority,” Guest said.
“People like to do what other people do, so knowing which cocktail is the most popular makes it an easy option.”
Promote a drink
Driving sales of certain drinks can also make preparing for shifts easier.
Guest believes that training should be designed to ensure everyone is at a certain standard to improve consistency, by ensuring the weakest barman is capable of producing top quality drinks — particularly with cocktails.
“High staff turnover within the industry is making it difficult to keep everyone trained to the same standards,” he said.
“When asked, licensees agree that training is important. But when I ask if they do enough of it, almost unanimously they say no. The challenge, as they see it, is time and labour costs.”
But training can incentivise staff to stay, and does not need to be overly complicated.
Simplifying the operation
“With cocktails it’s about simplifying the operation by making the recipes easier to remember and reducing the number of steps,” Guest said.
It’s better to avoid time consuming recipes to avoid bottlenecks and longer bar waiting time, he argued.
Diageo has trained 7,000 members of bar staff in the past year.
Guest added: “Consumers want to be inspired and have an experience they can’t replicate at home. They want new and exciting, but also simple and uncomplicated, drinks with great service and quality.”
Menu engineering
Customers can be assisted in cocktail choices by clever menu engineering.
Boxing out drinks you want to serve, with hints such as ‘this tastes great’ works well, alongside staff recommendations, to help customers make a decision. Rounding up to whole numbers makes the money seem like less, while moving costs out of columns reduces the ‘pain of paying’, Guest explained.