Best Practices and up to the minute news on Customer Experience Management and Service Excellence
Best Practices and up to the minute news on Customer Experience Management and Service Excellence
In the restaurant industry, beefing up your online presence is often considered to be a marketing activity. But it’s also an important way to provide better service to your customers, and that starts with helping them find you.
You may consider it marketing when you post a mouthwatering photo of your famous meatball sub or shrimp basil pizza, but if you look at it through a prospective customer’s eyes, you’re doing a service by helping them discover a great new place that serves up tasty food.
A 2022 survey found that over half of millennials (52 percent) have tried a new restaurant because they saw it on TikTok. And these diners will often go further out of their way to try that specific restaurant, and spend more money after they arrive.
Nurturing your online presence not only makes it easy to find your restaurant, it also helps customers explore your menu, get their questions answered and ultimately enjoy a delicious meal. Ideally, they’ll also discover a favorite spot they can return to again and again.
Here are five ways you can provide better service to diners by cultivating your online presence:
Once a prospective customer learns about your restaurant, they will want to learn more quickly. This happened to me recently: I had out-of-town friends visiting, and they had a hankering for Vietnamese food.
I had read an article about a new restaurant in town, and a Google search quickly landed me on their simple, beautiful website. It offered a snapshot of their history, clear and colorful photos of their most popular dishes, a button to click to see their menu and another for ordering takeout.
The page also prominently showed their address, phone number and location on a map. We immediately decided to go, and found that the in-person service and the food exceeded our expectations. This wasn’t a surprise considering the excellent online service they provided beforehand by anticipating and answering all of our questions on their website, and giving us a “taste” of what we’d experience when we arrived.
Whether a customer is looking forward to trying your fare or has already visited your restaurant, they’ll want to be able to access your current menu with prices. Put yourself in a customer’s shoes for a moment: maybe they’re vegetarian and want to see what veg options you offer.
Maybe they’re on a diet and want to choose and entree and calculate calories ahead of time. Maybe they’re on a budget and want to know how much the evening will cost. Or maybe they’re indecisive and would like to choose an appetizer, meal and dessert ahead of time to avoid making their dinner companions wait.
In fact, a recent survey shows that 57 percent of customers go online to view restaurant menus. So don’t make your customers try to hunt yours down on a third-party site, squinting at a bad photo snapped by another customer, and wondering if it’s correct or even belongs to you.
Choose one or two social media platforms where you want to be active, and create a consistent schedule for monitoring them and posting content.
Your content may consist of photos of your daily specials, news about a happy hour or deal, info about ordering takeout or highlights on your local ingredients and their producers.
Give your fans and followers content to peruse, and make sure that those who visit you on social media will see that you’ve posted recently. This helps to generate confidence, and to avoid scenarios where customers wonder if you’re still in business because you haven’t posted in six months.
Part of staying consistent on social media is meeting customers where they are to answer questions, accept feedback and respond to comments.
This is a way to provide great service to the customers who interact with you as well as the ones who see these interactions, learning a little more about your business in the process.
You’ll inevitably get panicked last-minute questions about whether, say, you offer gluten-free dinner options, or if your bread contains dairy.
When you’re responsive and engaged on social media, it not only serves those customers well so they can dine with confidence, but it also creates the impression that you care about your customers and reputation.
Like many other service-oriented businesses, restaurants must be proactive about online reviews.
It’s important to make sure you actively ask for reviews from happy customers, monitor your online reviews and respond to bad reviews. Learn the art of responding to a bad restaurant review: apologize graciously, try to make up for the bad experience and ask for a second chance.
This shows customers reading the reviews that you care, and will make them more likely to give you a chance despite the negative review.
Nurturing your online presence is all about the basics: making sure customers have a way to connect with you, get their questions answered, learn what’s new and give feedback. Like creating a fine sauce, it’s all about using quality ingredients and stirring consistently for excellent results.
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