Opening up a restaurant is one of the most common career paths for an entrepreneur. After all, it’s a pretty safe market! People are always going to need to eat, and they’re always going to want to eat in nice establishments that serve tasty food they can’t get at home.
Both convenience and creativity cross over here, which is a great combination for the entrepreneurial mindset!
However, a lot of new restaurants fail. Why? There can be a lot of factors at play, but one of the main to keep in mind is customer experience. If people eat out at your restaurant and end up disliking it, they’re not going to come back or recommend you to anyone else! So let’s make sure that never happens to you; here’s how to impress your diners.
Reduce Wait Times
We all know the most frustrating thing about going out to eat: having to wait! To be seated, for a reservation to be ready, to get drinks, for food to come out, for the bill at the end - this is a lot of waiting around and doing nothing.
But you can reduce these wait times in a variety of ways, and allow your diners a speedy and careful service that you can be proud of. Most of all, train your staff to move quickly between tables without compromising on the quality of the wait service they’ve been tasked to provide.
During busy periods, you can even allow diners to pre-order the food they want before they’ve even arrived. This way your chefs can get to work on prepping it at a certain time, and any preamble between being seated and the order going to the kitchen is completely cut out.
Make Payment Convenient
Another way to reduce wait times, and to make sure your customers find your customer service top notch and convenient, is to make payment as convenient as possible in turn.
You can do this by allowing them to pay at the table. If they can order and pay for their food and drink without leaving their seats or requiring one of your waitstaff to come over, their perception of the time it took to be served is going to be a lot shorter.
Sure, the kitchen may still have a lot of orders to get through, but customers won’t feel like they’ve been waiting forever. After all, they were able to order as soon as they were escorted to their table!
This also removes the confusion involved in paying the bill at the end of a meal. Do they have to wait for someone to bring the bill over? Do they have to go up to the bar? Does anyone even know they’re ready to pay? If there’s something on the table to scan, they can do so at their own leisure and pay when they’re ready.
Don’t Make Information Hard to Find
Diners love convenience above all else, especially if they're from out of town and are currently surfing the web looking for a good local restaurant! The best thing to do here? Answer their questions before they’ve even asked them.
When are you open and when do you close? What’s the max number of guests in a booking? Do you run event nights? If so, what times do they start and end? If you’re a restaurant during the day and more of a club at night, what times does that transition kick in? And of course: what’s on your menu and how much do dishes cost?
Questions like these can be very common amongst diners, but the answers tend to be hard to find out if they’re not already there in person. Make this easier. Routinely update your website and social media to reflect opening/closing times, what’s going on, and whether your menu or prices are changing. You can then announce these updates on social media as well.
It’s Always Worth it to Impress Your Diners!
If you’re a restauranter who’s new to the game, your goal right now should be to impress your diners. If you can, they’re going to come back for more, and they’re going to tell plenty of people about the good service and great food they received!
Work towards delivering an exceptional service by focusing on the three tips above. They can help your restaurant to become a success over time, and steadily bring in more and more excited diners who will soon turn into very happy regulars.
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