The Thing You Say When You Do Not Know
A guest asks something your staff cannot answer. What they say in that moment is unscripted, varies by person, and does more damage than the missing answer.
The four things people say
A guess. ⚠️ The most damaging, because it becomes a commitment. A guessed price or policy is honoured or argued about later.
"I'll check" — and then nothing. The intention was real. The shift got busy and the guest is still waiting.
"I don't know." Honest, and it leaves the guest holding the problem.
Deflection. "You'd have to ask the manager", with no manager produced. ⚠️ Reads as being passed around.
None of these is bad character. All four are what people do without a script.
What a good answer contains
Three parts, in about eight seconds:
Acknowledge the question is reasonable. "Good question" costs nothing and changes the tone.
Say what you will do. ⚠️ "Let me find out" with a specific next step — not a vague promise.
Say when. "Before you order" or "in two minutes" — a time, so the guest knows whether to wait.
Then actually do it. ⚠️ The part that fails. A promise to check that is not kept is worse than an honest "I don't know."
Making it possible to keep
The script only works if the answer is findable.
Know who has the answer, by role. ⚠️ Not "the manager" if the manager is not on.
Have the common answers written where staff are standing. The ten questions that come up repeatedly should not require finding anyone.
Make it acceptable to interrupt. ⚠️ If asking costs social capital, staff will guess instead — and the guessing is a symptom of that, not of laziness.
The guess is the one to eliminate
Worth saying explicitly to the team.
"Never guess on price, policy, or availability." ⚠️ A guessed answer is a promise the venue then has to honour or refuse — and both are worse than a short wait.
And back them when they say they will check. If checking is treated as slow service, they will stop and guess.
The manager's version
⚠️ Managers guess too, and with more authority, so the guess sticks harder.
"I'll confirm and come back to you" is available to everyone, including the person in charge, and it models the behaviour better than any instruction.
Afterwards
Every unanswerable question is a gap.
⚠️ Write it down — the same questions recur, and after a fortnight you have the list of what should be written where staff can see it.
Nobody does this, which is why the same question is unanswerable for years.
The guess is a system problem, not a character one
Nobody guesses when finding out is easy and fast
Everybody guesses when finding out means interrupting a busy manager
⚠️ The cost of asking sets the rate of guessing. Lower the first and the second falls without a single conversation about honesty.
The measure
"How long does it take a new person to find the answer to a common question?"
⇒ If it is more than thirty seconds, guessing is the rational choice and your team are behaving sensibly.
Answer the three questions before they are asked
Price and what is included
What happens if they are late
What you can and cannot do about a booking change
⚠️ These three generate most guesses. Written down, visible from where the phone is answered, they stop being questions.
Coming back is the whole promise
"I will find out" costs nothing to say
Coming back in five minutes is the entire value
⚠️ An unreturned "I will find out" is worse than "I do not know." The guest waited, and then learned they were not going to be told.
Make returning possible
Write the question down at the moment. Do not carry it.
⇒ ⚠️ A question held in the head during service does not survive the next interruption.
The manager's version is different
Saying "I do not know" to staff models it, permits it
Guessing in front of staff teaches guessing
⚠️ Whatever a manager does under pressure becomes the standard. Not what they said in training — what they did on the busy night.
Turn each one into a written answer
A question asked twice should never be asked a third time unanswered
⚠️ Two is the threshold. Once is a one-off; twice is a gap in what is written down.
⇒ Keep the list where the question gets asked — not in a folder, not in a group chat that scrolls.
What not to do with it
⚠️ Do not count how often each person says "I do not know." ⇒ The moment it is measured per person, it stops being said — and the guessing comes back invisibly.
A guest asks something. The person in front of them does not know.
What happens in the next three seconds has never been decided, and it varies enormously by who is standing there.
Three to hold
Questions staff could not answer, tallied for two weeks. ⚠️ The list is short and fixable.
Promises to check that were kept. ⚠️ Ask guests occasionally — the answer is worse than expected.
Whether the common answers are written anywhere. If they are in one person's head, everyone else is guessing by design.
Where the record has to sit
The answers have to be where the question is asked — the door, the table, the phone — and the gaps have to be recorded somewhere they will be reviewed. A shared document nobody opens mid-service fails both tests.
tasteck keeps pricing, courses and availability on the same screens used to take a booking, so the common answers are in front of whoever is being asked.
They were not being unhelpful. They were asked something they had no way to answer and no agreed thing to say, and three seconds is not long enough to invent one.
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