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Mentoring High Opportunity Servers

Updated

Mentoring High Opportunity Servers

After you have mastered Avero's Service Summary Report, you can use Avero's Service Solutions to drive revenue by improving the average check of high opportunity servers. In this article, the following topics will be discussed:

 

Identifying Servers for Mentoring

After running a Service Summary Report for the prior month,  we can dive into how to identify specific servers that are in need of mentoring to improve their average check.  After you have run the report, complete the following steps:

  1. Make exclusions to your service team. We would recommend removing any servers from this report that are servers in training, former employees, employees who have been promoted to other positions, and part-time servers. Making these exclusions will ensure an accurate peer set with associated accurate team averages. 
  2. Check off the servers that you want to exclude and then choose the exclude button. You can always add back those excluded servers into the report if you need to.
  3. The red dots next to the server's names represent the bottom 20% of your team based on their average check.  Avero recommends focusing your mentoring efforts on the bottom 20% as they have the largest area of opportunity. 
  4. Mentor the servers with the highest Lost Sales Opportunity, which is the server's difference from the team average check multiplied by the number of covers they saw during this time period. This is the amount of money this server is leaving on the table for your restaurant. To motivate servers, Avero also calculates the Lost Tip Opportunity, which is the server's average tip % multiplied by the Lost Sales Opportunity. 

Lost_Sales_Opp.png

 

Identifying Categories for Coaching

Now that you have identified the servers you want to mentor, it is important to better understand each server's opportunity for improvement.  In order to find your server's area of opportunity by category,  click on the hyperlink for the server name to get to the Avero's Server Scorecard, which will provide more information about the server's performance. 

What is Avero's Server Scorecard?

Avero's Server Scorecard is a detailed report with key statistics about a specific team member and their performance in comparison to the peer set. When viewing the Server Scorecard, keep the following in mind:

  • The first page of the Server Scorecard gives an overview of total sales, void/promo % compared to the team, and cover/check volume.
  • The second page gives you detailed statistics about the server's performance in specific major (i.e Beverage) and minor (i.e Red Wine) categories in comparison to the rest of the peer set. 
  • Avero recommends using the following 2 metrics when looking at the Server Scorecard.  To learn more about these metrics and what they mean, access this Metrics page.
    • Average Check per covers
    • Item/Cover %
  • Avero recommends selecting a few categories where your servers have the highest variance compared to the team average check or item/cover % and working with those servers to improve their performance in those specific categories. 

 

Tracking Server Performance Over Time 

In order to track improvement, Avero recommends setting up a daily emailed report to track server progress.  This report will show you your week-by-week performance by individual server.  To set up this report follow these steps:

  1. Click on the Service Category report
  2. Select trend 4 weeks ending yesterday
  3. Select the two minor categories you had identified from the scorecard
  4. Set your metric to item per cover %
  5. Email this report out on the first day of your business week. Your description should include the name of the 2-4 servers you are tracking during the period.

We typically recommend working with these lower-performing servers for a 4-8 week period, giving them enough time to make substantial improvements! When working with these servers, make sure to emphasize that improvements in the average check will lead to more money in tips! 

 

Need additional help?  Watch the following video for further instruction.

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