Customer Perception

In every business, we need customers to survive. The business is open for the customers and they are very important people to invest in. Customer Perception is a fundamental core of business success. It is the largest contributor to customer satisfaction. When their perception of us is good, it encourages repeat visits as well as good publicity through word-of-mouth. Hence, it is important that every of our customer is a satisfied one. Every customer sees things differently, meaning they can have different perceptions of the same thing. This means that each customer perceives satisfaction differently. It is thus a challenge to keep every customer satisfied with their varying perception of satisfaction.

This topic teaches us some of the factors that customer perception is based on so that we can gear our efforts towards those factors such as marketing effort and product design to form a good impression. I have also learnt from this topic that there are bound to be unhappy customers. Since they are already unhappy, the only thing that we can do will be service recovery, to do our best in earning back their trust by making amends. This will help to build a better perception of the company.


ToP Table

This topic is practical and applicable to the times I am working at Top Table. For example, Top Table is an educational institute that trains students to be ‘at the top’ in terms of service quality. Hence, according to the assessment reference of customer satisfaction, Top Table aims to be at the ‘ideal stage’, where customer satisfaction is derived partly based on experience, partly on desire. However, I think that Top Table is currently at the ‘predicted stage’, where the service standard is based solely on customer’s experience. This is because the service at Top Table is provided by students, and it may not be too good as all of us are undergoing training and we might make mistakes that upset the guest. Also, we serve ice-water, with the main courses if guests requests for it and this is the standard for many formal dining restaurants. Since it is similar to competitors, it is currently at the ‘predicted stage.’

Also as mentioned earlier, we might make mistakes that upset the guest during our course of training. This thus means that we must do service recovery. At Top Table, we make amends of bad customer experience by giving them a feedback form together with the bill for them to rate our service standards, food quality, write their valuable feedback and highlight any areas for improvement. Then, after everything is done, for our debrief, we will all read out the feedback by our customer to everyone and talk about our performance for the day or explain why that a particular comment on the feedback form is written, and any area of improvements. Top Table values customer satisfaction and service recovery helps to alter and build a better perception of the company.

Linking this to the topic Building a Professional Presence, our grooming is also part of how customer perceives us. When we are well-groomed, we will appear more professional and hence more credible, allowing the customer to have faith in us and our services.

From the above example, we can see that customers are very important to us and that is why we are doing all we can to retain their loyalty for repeated visits and perhaps positive publicity through word-of-mouth. As we are in the hospitality industry, we must provide good service and service standards perceived by every customer is different. This tells us that we have to be in tip-top performance at all times such that every customer perceives us as a good service provider, leading to customer satisfaction.

When we come out to work in future, we will be dealing with customers from all over the world. From this topic, I have learnt that it is hence important to manage their perception well and do our best to make them very satisfied so as to retain their loyalty and repeat visits.

References:

http://www.tp.edu.sg/home/about/facilities/food.htm