Top 5 Things Your Restaurant Might Be Doing that Drives Customers Away

Owning a restaurant is a balancing act. You must manage food costs, keep customers coming through the doors, monitor employee attitudes and put out excellent food. However, there are 5 things your restaurant might be doing that drives customers away and will ultimately spell doom for your restaurant.

  1. Bad Customer Service

It doesn’t matter how tasty your food is or how good your prices, if you provide bad customer service at any point in the process you will leave a “bad taste” in your customer’s mouth, who will simply go to one of the other many establishments that also offer good food and prices but instead provide excellent customer service.

Some instances of bad service that you will want to look for and address include:

  • Untrained staff who don’t know or understand the menu
  • Slow service times
  • Staff arguing with one another or cutting up loudly
  • Disrespecting the customer (the customer should ALWAYS be right even if he/she is wrong)
  1. Inconsistent Food Experience

Have you ever gone to your favorite restaurant excited to get your favorite menu item and discovered that the recipe had been changed and it just wasn’t as tasty as before? Return customers usually revisit a restaurant to order a specific menu item. If the item isn’t just as good each time, that customer may stop coming.

Are you:

  • Using the same ingredients every time?
  • Training all cooks from the same recipe?
  • Checking the food yourself from time to time to be sure the food is consistent?
  • Demanding perfection from your staff on the appearance of the food before it leaves the kitchen?
  1. Dirt and Grime

Nothing turns customers off faster than a sticky table, dirty floors, grit and grime. Would you want to eat of a table that obviously had not been cleaned thoroughly between you and the last patron? Some ways to keep down the dirt and grime:

  • Hire enough staff to keep tables cleared, cleaned and the floor around them swept and mopped.
  • Do a deep cleaning after each busy meal shift. So, clean thoroughly after breakfast, lunch and dinner (if serving all three). In addition, if the restaurant has slow periods, the staff should all pitch in to pay attention to the little details. Clean salt and pepper shakers, wipe down ceiling fans, clean the kitchen, etc. Even if the customer can’t see it, it should be kept clean and sanitary.
  1. Clean the Bathrooms

In a 2010 Harris Interactive poll, about 2,175 adults were surveyed to find out their thoughts about restaurants they’d dined in. A whopping 88 percent of those people said that they judge a restaurant based on how clean the bathrooms were. The cleanliness of a bathroom equals the cleanliness of your employees

From what they saw in the bathroom, they assumed the kitchen and prep areas were similar. To make sure your bathrooms are in tip-top shape:

  • Do several checks a day and make sure any paper is picked up.
  • Keep the toilets, sinks and floors clean.
  • Keep supplies well stocked.
  • Do a smell check. If the bathroom smells bad in any way, it needs to be cleaned.
  1. Being Too Set in Your Ways

Yes, you are a pizza parlor, but when a customer comes in and asks if you can create a low carb concoction of pizza toppings without the bread underneath, do you do your best to accommodate or do you ignore the request and mutter under your breath that if they don’t want bread they shouldn’t go out for Italian?

Today, more and more people have special dietary needs or wants. Look at your menu and try to figure out what you can do to accommodate these needs without drastically increasing your supply costs. Can you offer a whole wheat crust? A carb-free crust? Perhaps an all veggie toppings pizza would attract vegetarians? What other ingredients would be unfriendly to vegetarians and can you easily change them?

By thinking outside the box and keep an eye on what truly satisfies your customers, you’ll gain loyal patrons. Not only will they come to your establishment for their dining needs, they’ll tell their family and friends how much they love it.

 

 

 

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