5 Tips To Improve Customer Experience in Your Restaurant

While serving excellent quality food is essential to the success of a restaurant, there are other things you need to do to truly deliver excellent customer experiences.

This can include things like delivering exceptional customer service, consistently updating menus and having a loyalty program. After all, delivering amazing food is great, but when the customer service isn’t up to standard you’re unlikely to see returning guests. Adding on to this, continually getting poor customer reviews will negatively impact your ability to attract new customers, causing profits to fall. 

The importance of customer feedback

It’s important to collect customer feedback to help you understand your restaurant's strengths and weaknesses. 

At Yumpingo we understand that it can be difficult to know what information to delve into when you have an abundance of customer feedback. That’s why our customer experience management platform provides you with Smart Actions to help you make simple, but effective decisions that improve customer experience.

Smart Actions provides you with weekly insight notifications to help you and your teams across different locations create development plans that improve business processes and performance. 

To make things even easier for restaurant managers, we highlight resolvable actions that make the biggest positive impact on your business. This can include things like targeted menu and service improvements.

How to improve your customer experience

There are a variety of ways you can improve customer experience within your restaurant.

Keeping your staff happy

Maintaining motivated and happy staff is a key ingredient for delivering excellent customer service. When your staff are happy and enjoy working at your restaurant they’re more likely to go above and beyond to deliver a higher quality of service. 

The service profit chain model highlights that when you improve employee satisfaction, customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, revenue growth and increased profits is also achieved. This alone should encourage restaurants to work harder at keeping their staff happy as at the end of the day it has a huge knock-on effect that positively affects both the business and its customers.

You can keep your staff happy by:

• Offering training and development opportunities.
• Creating a positive working environment.
• Encouraging teamwork and communication.
• Seeking employee feedback to understand how they perceive your company and what you can do to improve their experiences. 
• Using server-level feedback to focus the training of each team member. 

Consistently improve menus

Consistently improving your menus can significantly boost customer experiences.

You can improve your menu by asking questions like, ‘Can I simplify the way this dish is prepared?’ or ‘Can I change the supplier of a certain product to improve profit margins?’.

These are great methods to begin adapting your menus in a way that’s will make a difference to customer behavior and perceptions. While updating menus based on seasonality and diner preferences is important, combining them with the questions above can help you satisfy your customers and keep them coming back for more. 

Menu changes also allow restaurants to adapt toward seasonal produce, which ensures food is fresh and of great quality, as well as helping to cut costs down. It also allows you to cater to various dietary requirements, helping you appeal to a wider audience.

Furthermore, making changes to the design of your menu can make a huge difference to customer experiences. For example, studies show that dishes with an image on the menu are more likely to be ordered than those without an image. This is due to customers being able to see what they’re ordering and whether it meets their expectations.

Implement a loyalty program

Loyalty programs not only reward loyal customers but also help to create them. By offering incentives like exclusive discounts, personalized offers or access to special events, restaurants can make customers feel valued and recognized. This builds an emotional connection between the diner and the restaurant that encourages return visits and recommendations to friends and family. 

Loyalty programs also allow restaurants to collect data on customer behavior and preferences, allowing them to make effective marketing decisions and dish offerings. This helps to create excellent customer experiences as they’ll feel more personalized and tailored toward your guest’s needs and expectations.

Grow your satisfaction levels

At Yumpingo we believe in helping restaurants boost satisfaction growth. This is where we help you increase your NPS (Net Promoter Score) by providing insights and suggestions that effectively improve your business practices. This in turn boosts customer experiences and increases customer retention. 

We’ve found that focusing on satisfaction growth can deliver 20% more sales and seven times more revenue than guest recovery. Rather than focusing on the unhappy customers who have already left and are unlikely to return, we focus on fixing service and food issues before they affect your guests, so the next guests leave as advocates.

When we distribute surveys respondents reply to questions using either a thumbs up or thumbs down or a points scale, depending on the questions being asked. Responses are then converted into three groups, the ‘promoters/advocates’, the ‘neutrals/passives’ or the ‘detractors’ (those that felt unhappy with their experience).

At Yumpingo we focus on the ‘neutral’ or ‘passive’ customers and look at how your restaurant can turn them into a ‘promoter’ or ‘advocate’ of your brand. A highly satisfied guest is worth 3 times more to your restaurant than a satisfied one. In fact, this is more cost effective and likely to lead to an increase in profits and footfall within your restaurants. An easy way to convert your customers into ‘advocates’ is to utilize our Customer Experience Management Platform, as it provides you with simple improvements that’ll make a big difference to the way you operate and the customer experiences you provide.

For example, our suggestions could include things like adapting or changing menu items or optimizing team training. This can transform underperforming restaurant locations and improve customer experiences. 

When speaking to Seymores’ CEO Jay Wainwright about their experience with our Customer Experience Management Platform, he stated that ‘it’s become an integral part of the day to day fabric of our company’. 

While using our platform Seymore’s has seen an increase of 12 NPS points and a 60% decrease in unhappy guests. This highlights that focussing on satisfaction growth can significantly impact the experiences restaurants provide their customers.

To learn more about how we helped Seamore's drive satisfaction growth, watch our video below.

Manage your restaurant’s reputation 

When it comes to reputation management it’s all about curating and managing the image of your restaurant that you want your customers to see.

You can do this by monitoring direct and indirect reviews. Direct reviews include any feedback you’ve asked your customers for directly, whether this is in person or through an online survey.

Indirect reviews can include things like social media posts and comments or online reviews through sites like Tripadvisor. This can help you understand how your restaurant is currently performing and whether it meets your expectations. 

If you’re looking for help with managing the reputation of your restaurant, utilizing a reputation management platform is a great way to understand what you need to work on and how. 

At Yumpingo our Reputation Management Platform can provide you with complete visibility of real-time customer satisfaction levels across all of your locations. While using our platform we can help you:

• Grow brand awareness by improving your online ratings and rankings to boost your visibility and attract more customers. 
• Manage guest recovery to help you close the loop with your customers to increase retention and ensure your online reputation reflects your brand positively. 
• Benchmark your brand by monitoring your brand reputation and competitive advantage in your specific market and local area.

If you’re looking to improve your customer experience levels, book a demo with Yumpingo today to see how we can help.