Increase Tips with Persuasion II
31st October 2009
In the prior post, “Increase Tips with Persuasion,” I outlined a Cue-based approach for servers to increase their tips. That post describes simple action examples of the CLARCCS Cues. The nice feature is that the information goes beyond the common and widely used practices that focus upon various Liking and Authority (Expertise) moves many servers already know and use. I’ll extend my thinking about persuasion and tips in this post by thinking not about a specific persuasion play, but the strategy and planning for persuasion plays.
A Persuasion Strategy is not a particular Cue or play, but rather a way to organize and plan how you do plays. Think about three: Teams, Scripts, and Ding Dongs.
1. Consider a team approach to all of this. Coordinate tactics with other servers in your immediate area and help each other. Remember the Comparison play? Well, when one server sees a couple having a great experience, that server tells all the other servers that there’s a great Comparison Model in the room. Then in a coordinated fashion that server goes over to the Great Experience couple and makes a noisy observation about “Gee, you are having a great time!” or “Gee, looks like this is going great!” Other servers in the area now have an obvious positive model and they can make the Comparison play.
A team approach obviously requires coordination and cooperation from several different people. You also have management in on this. Team Persuasion does not require a financial investment, but does require time for people to sit down with each other and think about this. Better organizations do this as a matter of course. Before servers hit the floor, everyone gets together for a few minutes and goes over the latest dishes, prices, policy changes, etc. We’re just giving you a new agenda item for these planning meetings.
I’d recommend that everyone read and discuss the CLARRCS Cues, then talk about specific examples they’ve seen of the Cues happening in the bar or restaurant. Once everyone understands the Cue and how it works, then start developing Team plans. It could start with the “Greet and Seat” function where folks doing this set up persuasion plays with key phrases or observations of customer characteristics. This gets shared with the service function that takes orders, serves, and bills. And, it concludes with the “Bye, Y’All” function. Think about it. The opportunities are boundless.
A team approach obviously requires coordination and cooperation from several different people. You also have management in on this. Team Persuasion does not require a financial investment, but does require time for people to sit down with each other and think about this. Better organizations do this as a matter of course. Before servers hit the floor, everyone gets together for a few minutes and goes over the latest dishes, prices, policy changes, etc. We’re just giving you a new agenda item for these planning meetings.
Here’s an example torn from the pages of a practical persuasion project done in 1995. A young woman taking my persuasion course saw the value of using CLARRCS Cues in her part time job. She’d organized the West Virginia Bikini Team, composed of four fit, shapely, and attractive women who worked the High Street party bars in Morgantown.
Susan’s team contracted with various beer distributors and worked bars with her team promoting new products. As part of a class assignment, she added a health and safety behavior to the team’s for-profit function. Her team received training in alcohol management and during their regular work, they used persuasion Cues to get drunk customers to take a taxi home rather than try and drive. Here’s a pamphlet they handed out as customers arrived on the scene and before they’d started drinking.
And some people wonder why WVU is always one of the top party schools in those notorious surveys. We work at it.
If you’ve got good eyes and a high resolution screen you can make out the hook line Susan and her team used to organize things:
Party to Survive! Don’t Drink and Drive!
Susan wrote a paper on this and described the various Cues the team employed, plus all the coordination the team used to keep each other informed about each other’s knowledge and action. If one woman spotted a customer who appeared to be past the legal limit, she might hand the customer off to another team member who would use one Cue. If that didn’t work, another team member would glide by a bit later. She detailed how they assessed the persuasion campaign and provided anecdotal evidence. She also included a lot of photographs and posters of the Team in action and frankly, my mind’s a haze after that, and I don’t recall the exact statistics, but I was impressed!
The crucial lessons from this example are two: 1) plan it and 2) communicate while doing it. The Bikini Team got on the same page with CLARRCS Cues, knew what they were, how they operated, and, more importantly, how the Team wanted to employ them. Then, during the event, the Team engaged in a lot of on-task communication sharing with each other key information that helped everyone run persuasion plays.
Whether you wear a bikini or a suit when you serve, get the point. Team work makes Cues more effective.
2. Think about making simple Tip Scripts. A script is a written sequence of dialog and action that describes a persuasion scene. You make make detailed scripts with Sighs, Gasps, and Worried Looks with instructions for movements, props, and lighting effects. You can make a simple Script with just a brief line describe each CLARRCS Cue. The crucial thing here is that you write it down first.
Scripts make you think about your work and how you can make persuasion a routine part of it, just like your greeting, recitation of specials, and any other standardized palaver. You can practice your Script before you execute it. If you’ve written it down, you can erase, underline, or modify it after you’ve tried it out.
But write it down. Begin with . . .
. . . a customer enters my station . . .
And go from there.
3. Something I have not found in the research lit (but I’ve read ideas in popular press) is what play to make at the crucial moment: When the customer is paying the bill. That’s when your tip is on the line and we know that the closer you play the Cue to the desired behavior the more impact the Cue has. And given that we’re dealing with Low WATT processors, we are talking about just a few minutes here. You need to develop a killer Cue near the end of the meal, but just moments before the check arrives.
A smart strategy here would be to use a preplanned set of Cues during service and associate each with a Ding Dong. The Ding Dong is, of course, classical conditioning where a previously neutral signal is able to elicit a response as in that most famous of instances, Pavlov’s dog, whom Professor Pavlov conditioned to salivate when a bell rang. As a server you could do several of the previous Cues and each time you enact them successfully, you offer a catch phrase like, “This is good for you!” or “Happy to be here” or “That makes it right!” or some other phrase that is friendly, simple, and functionally meaningless. Then when you provide the bill, you offer the same catch phrase.
Assuming you have delivered good service that produced a positive attitude in your customers with each Cue, that catch phrase acts as an accumulator that adds up each instance into one memory – the server’s doing a good job. Then when you present the bill and run the Ding Dong, you should trigger that positive accumulation across all the Cues.
Let’s hit the Outro with this long post.
1. CLARCCS Cues provides a wider base of operations for servers. Learn the Cues.
2. While any one Cue may be effective, your persuasion plays become more powerful when you combine them in a strategy. Whether you use Teams, Scripts, or a Ding Dong Close, you can plan ahead to reap largers tips.
3. Sit down and write this out. Think about it. Talk with another server. Plot. Plan. Strategize. Remember the Rule:
Persuasion is strategic or it is not.