3 Easy Ways To Improve Customer Experience At Your Restaurant

Your guests are number one.

How can you make them feel special and show them you care?

Here are the 3 best ways to improve the customer experience at your restaurant to keep customers coming back for more:

Treat Your Employees Well

Surprised to see this one here? You shouldn’t be.

According to a Washington State University study, customer satisfaction is directly correlated with employee engagement. In other words, if your employees aren’t motivated, your customers won’t be happy.

Positivity is contagious. How you treat employees, both in front of and away from customers, will impact customer experience.

It’s important to invest in your employees to keep them motivated.

Studies have shown that three key areas to focus on are 1) expressing appreciation 2) increasing transparency of performance and business decisions and 3) assisting with personal problems after spending time learning about your employees on a personal level.

If you thought going above and beyond for employees wasn’t part of your job, think again.

Personalize Customer Experience

There are some best practices to follow here that almost every customer will appreciate, including:

• A greeting on arrival
• Low wait times
• Frequent check-ins after being seated
• Quickly addressing simple requests

Beyond best practices, take the time to get to know your customers to understand how you can customize experience further.

For example, some customers have dietary restrictions. Demonstrate menu flexibility around those restrictions to really score points with this group.

Remember customer preferences when they return to your location.

Your two best ways to understand what your customers want are to engage in conversations with them and to study your data.

You succeed if you can make the customer experience feel personalized and not transactional.

Ask For Customer Feedback

Engaging customers in conversation is a must. But as a great supplement, you should offer a formalized feedback process, like a survey form, to make it as easy as possible for customers to leave feedback.

Sometimes customers can be shy, or don’t want to be rude when socializing, so a survey provides a great opportunity for customers to express more honest details about their experience.

This is also a great opportunity to get feedback in areas you might not consider asking for directly, including ambience, bathroom quality, etc.

Remember, it doesn’t matter if you think you are doing a good enough job, if customers are complaining about something, it is an issue!

Another good idea to facilitate feedback is to offer rewards and discounts. Using rewards to encourage customers to spend more is great, but using rewards to get customer data is also valuable.

As you get customer feedback, don’t just sit on it! Use what you know to improve customer experience!

Good luck!

Thanks for reading :P