Running a restaurant business can be quite a challenge. The main reason is that you operate in a highly competitive market and you have to really impress your customers to ensure their retention and satisfaction.
This can become a daunting task, mainly because it’s not just about the food you serve but the entire experience you provide to customers from the moment they enter your restaurant to the moment they leave. If you don’t make an effort to provide a truly seamless and exceptional experience for your customers, they’ll most likely go somewhere else and never return.
Ensuring customer loyalty is, therefore, a task you must pay special attention to if you want your restaurant to thrive despite all the competition you’re up against. With that in mind, here are a few ways you can improve the customer experience of your restaurant.
Conduct a competitive analysis
As mentioned before, you operate in a market that has fierce competition. What that means is that you cannot operate on a gut feeling in hopes of outrunning your competitors. Instead, you’ll need some data to back your decisions with.
The main reason is that you must know how your competitors operate so that you don’t end up copying them without even realizing it. Customers will consider this a bad and desperate move even though your intentions were quite different. That’s why a competitive analysis is a must for restaurants.
As an example, you must determine how your competitors craft customer experience ranging from which type of food they serve to how they interact with customers. The purpose of this analysis is to help you find a way to do something unique and thus stand out from the competition.
Work on customer service
As you might imagine, customers come to your restaurant to eat and enjoy themselves, and they want this experience to be as seamless as possible. That includes ordering food, paying or splitting a bill and so on.
That’s why it’s important to develop an efficient customer-centric service that will greatly contribute to the overall experience and satisfaction. For instance, you can automate the ordering process with a well-designed self service kiosk.
This can significantly boost turnovers and improve your restaurant’s cash flow, aside from providing customers with convenience. Simply put, you need to resolve every customer pain point you can so that you can ensure a great experience while having business value in mind as well. Check out one of the best customer experience podcasts to maybe get some more pointers on how to improve overall, because getting an outside perspective really can’t hurt if you’re scrambling to find out ways to improve.
Create an ideal ambient
A good experience is not just about the food and the convenient way to get it. As a matter of fact, a good experience involves much more and you can be sure that customers will form their impressions based on every detail. For that reason, try to create an ideal ambient suited to your target audience.
The environment people spent their time while eating can very much influence how they feel and whether or not they’ll actually enjoy both the food and the time spend at your restaurant. What’s more, it’s not just about how your food tastes but also how it’s arranged and presented that matters as well.
According to a study, a visually appealing dish can make people believe that the food tastes better. In fact, they’ll believe that the food tastes 29% better and they’ll be willing to pay up to three times more for it. Therefore, with the right ambient and the food that not only tastes great but looks amazing as well, you can create an experience that your customers will certainly love and enjoy.
Engage with your customers
Engaging with your customers at your restaurant in a polite and efficient way is just the first step towards creating an amazing experience. What you should also do is engage your customers online as well. A good example of engaging customers online is social media networks, Instagram in particular.
Aside from using this network to drive traffic to your restaurant, you can also use it to engage with customers and share content with them. In addition, you can ask for customer feedback, hold contests and reward customers with discounts, coupons and other relevant gifts.
Engagement created online also contributes to the overall customer experience. This is especially true when you lead potential customers throughout an entire journey from discovering your restaurant on Instagram to them agreeing to come down and have a meal. Every detail counts when trying to win over customers in a highly competitive environment.
Creating an amazing customer experience in your restaurant can be a challenge but it’s not impossible to ensure customer satisfaction, retention and loyalty. That being said, you have to meet customer preferences and expectations while finding a way to offer your customers something truly unique.
