How To Engage With Your Restaurant Customers

Engaging with your customers and making them feel seen and appreciated is an important part of the restaurant business. Customer engagement is the key to getting patrons excited about your restaurant and spreading good word of mouth. If you’re not sure if you’re connecting with your customers enough or in the right ways, we can help. Keep reading to learn how to engage with your restaurant customers.

Give Them Conversation Channels

If you want good customer engagement, you have to give your patrons somewhere to share their experiences. While some customers will feel comfortable telling a server or manager about their experience, many will prefer another communication channel where they can talk to you and other patrons. Social media is the most popular conversation channel for businesses and people, and you can encourage your customers to post about their experiences there to help generate good conversations. One way to incentivize customers to use your social media channels is to offer rewards for people who post pictures or reviews, such as a gift card for your restaurant. Make sure to engage with pictures, posts, and reviews in other ways as well, such as posting your thanks for their opinion or inviting them back in the future.

Train a Diverse Staff

The hospitality of your restaurant needs to be top quality if you want customers to enjoy themselves, tell others about you, and come back. One way to improve hospitality is to hire a diverse staff and train them well. Customers will feel more comfortable engaging with people like them. So having an ethnically diverse staff that can greet them and take orders in various languages, understand religious or ethnic food restrictions, and treat guests like extended family will help you create loyal patrons out of first-time visitors. If possible, keep your staff on similar schedules so that customers can create rapport and relationships with their favorite serves and bartenders. These relationships will allow for further engagement in the restaurant and any additional channels like the ones we mentioned above.

Offer a Loyalty Program

You can only properly engage with your customers if you know them and their spending habits. Offering a loyalty program allows you to do just that. You can track when and how your customers spend and give them an extra reason to visit you frequently. Your loyalty program can be as simple as a punch card that eventually gets return customers a free coffee or a membership card they can swipe when they check out. A membership card will provide more detailed information because it can track spending trends, as we mentioned above. However, a punch card is still a great way to reward customers and help their spending habits feel seen and appreciated.

There are many ways to engage with your restaurant customers. But creating conversation channels, training a diverse staff, and offering a loyalty program are the best way to make customers feel appreciated. As you listen to your customers, interact with them, and reward them, you’ll see your restaurant grow and thrive.