The Key to Customer Communication

The restaurant industry evolves alongside trends and customer expectations. Whatever new technology or revenue streams your business decides to try, it’s important to provide effective customer communication. Keep your best patrons in the loop and demonstrate how you’re prioritizing the things that matter to them.

For example, COVID-19 completely changed the common approach to business. Now as diners prioritize convenience, safety and speed, restaurants need to find new ways to engage without face-to-face service. When orders go awry or experience simply doesn’t match up to expectation, quality customer communication is crucial for retention and loyalty.

Restaurants have fierce competition. Combine that with the natural uncertainty of COVID-19, and your business needs to compensate with a fortified plan of action.

When you know why you’re conveying certain messages, your restaurant has smarter conversations that properly represent your brand and what you stand for. With face-to-face interaction impossible and unsafe, customer communication now takes place over text, phone call, email, newsletter, social media and even online review sites. Your business and its goals should grow in the same direction as your patrons, no matter where they go.

If guests don’t get the service they expect, they’ll go to your competition instead. Transparency matters, and so does frequency; customers like to know what’s going with their orders. Provide up-to-date information and immediately notify them if anything changes.

Open communication doesn’t just mean you talk and they get the message. Listening skills also matter, like the ability to answer their questions or concerns professionally. Stay open to criticism and learn from your best customers exactly what they want out of their experience, and then prove your dedication by genuinely adjusting to meet their needs.

Listening and open conversation show your best customers that you care, that you appreciate the time they’ve spent with your establishment when they had so many other restaurants to choose from. Find your competitive edge simply by being straightforward about what’s going on behind the scenes. In uncertain times, your guests will thank you.

Consistent, strong messages breed loyalty. After all, most customers want to know the best way to support local businesses right now while keeping themselves, and their families, safe from coronavirus. Make a system for customer communication to help guide your staff through common questions they may face. Improve every guest’s experience by creating a standard for handling everything from complaints to compliments.

Related posts:

I feel that it is time to look back on this year to review the important steps that are contributing to the construction of the design organ at Famoco. So, let's do it together…

Sea of Thieves Anniversary Update is full of hidden gems: some of them refer to elements of the expanded universe and others could potentially tease the content to come in the future.

Leadership can be categorized into essentially two styles: Transactional Leadership and Transformational Leadership. Transactional leaders focus on applying management principles, prescribe desired…