Stars for Specials

How has this idea enhanced your club's operation, etc.?

The Stars for Specials initiative was created by the Food and Beverage Management team in an effort to encourage servers to confidently communicate our weekly culinary specials to enhance the member experience through suggestive selling. By allowing staff to practice memorizing our culinary specials at pre- shift meetings we have seen their ability to communicate them to tables consistently improve. Through this competition the sales of our specials have increased as well as the knowledge and overall professionalism of our service staff. This idea has led to nearly all servers, hosts and bartenders being able to recite the specials to their tables without relying on reading them off, as had previously been the case. Members have noticed the positive change and are impressed when servers can describe these dishes to them in great detail.

How was this idea implemented, and what have been the club members' reactions?

We began in our daily line ups having servers verbalize the specials they had memorized out loud to the rest of the team. If they are able to verbally recite from memory every special with all of the ingredients correctly then they would receive a star for that day. At the end of each month we total the amount of stars that each server had earned and the top three receive prizes. These range from an extra day of PTO to an Amazon gift card or a bottle of wine.

We continue to utilize the stars throughout other training and sales initiatives. We do "Home Run" tickets where if a certain combination of predetermined items are sold on one ticket it is considered a "Home Run" which results in three stars being added to their total. We also use it for various beverage sale competitions such as featured wines and cocktails. All of these initiatives combined lead to numerous ways that servers can accumulate stars which creates a friendly competitive environment. Overall, the staff has greatly enjoyed having a tangible way to stay motivated to increase their sales and service level.