Why Customers are Avoiding your Restaurant?
Running a restaurant business is already a challenging endeavour. But if you do not know why customers are avoiding your restaurant (sometimes like a plague), your restaurant is doomed to fail before it even starts.
Rather than solely blaming your restaurant location, here the most likely reasons why customers are avoiding eating in your restaurant.
#1. Health Inspection
Health inspection is easily one of the top reasons why customers avoid a restaurant. After all, no one wants to get food poisoning.
If your restaurant gets a health inspection warning, it will take some time for your restaurant’s reputation to recover. In the worst case scenario, you might be forced to close your restaurant.
Some of ways to mitigate this risk is to regularly check the cleanliness of your restaurant.
In fact, implementing a reward system in your restaurant for cleanliness will encourage your employees to ensure that it is clean at all times.
#2. Bad Review From A Friend
Another important reason why your customers are avoiding your restaurant is bad reviews.
If your restaurant is constantly getting bad reviews whether for the quality of service, taste or price of the food, your restaurant are going to lose out on new customers.
However, nothing is more powerful than a bad review from your potential customers’ friends. You will lose a customer just by a word of mouth.People make decisions based on the people that they trust. So if their friends gave bad reviews, do you think they will come to your restaurant?
Although there is no way to stop bad reviews, your restaurant should always keep a high standard of quality of service. On top of that, especially on the digital sphere, you should actively attend to the reviews that your customers give.
You should strive to provide continuous improvements regardless if it is a good or bad review.If a customer knows that your restaurant is constantly improving, they will definitely come to your restaurant.
#3. Expensive
Price is a very subjective manner. Whether something is categorised as “expensive” or “cheap” is dependent on the perceived value that a customer sees.
If your food is exceptionally tasty but the portion might be a little small, your customer will still regard it as reasonable.
This is because it matches the price that they are paying. A lot of people are willing to pay for amazing experiences.
Similarly, if your food tastes bad, no matter how large of a portion that you are offering, customers are going to perceive it as expensive.
Therefore it is important to balance all aspects of your restaurant to the average price that you are charging for your food menu item, from the atmosphere up to the taste of the food.
#4. Boring
Your ran the risk of being a boring restaurant if you do not regularly take the steps to introduce new menu.
This problem is gets even worse if you are offering common food that your customer can easily get from somewhere else.
Though you do not need to constantly update your restaurant’s menu, it is important to constantly innovate and introduce new food items every once in a while.
A fresh new menu from time to time will help motivated customers to come back and try your new menu selections.
#5. Long Waiting Time
Nothing can be more frustrating than waiting a long time for your food, especially if you are hungry.
Regardless of how good the taste of the food that your restaurant prepares, a long waiting time will push away a lot of potential customers. A study found that 55% of restaurant goers are deterred by wait times of 30 minutes or more.
Not only that, your table turnover will be lower than what it can be; resulting in loss in revenue.
Therefore it is important to make continuous improvements to your restaurant’s operations. This is to ensure things are done efficiently and effectively.
One of the fastest ways to give quick boost your restaurant’s operations and significantly reduce your order processing time is to invest in a good point-of-sale system such as Slurp! iPad POS.
Your waiters can now take orders over a tablet to be sent to the kitchen immediately to be processed.
Not only does this reduces the average order processing time, but it also increases the accuracy of the order.
#6. Bad Customer Service
Another reason why customers are avoiding your restaurant is because of bad service. Nobody wants to be treated poorly when they are out dining, but these incidents do happen and some customers are put off by it.
Imagine going to a restaurant after a stressful day with hopes of enjoying a great meal with a great atmosphere, but instead, having to deal with bad service. That is certainly not a great experience and some would consider not coming back to the restaurant.
Below are some examples of bad service, try to think whether your restaurant have these characteristics.
- Ignoring customers who have seated for a period of time
- Not acknowledging genuine mistakes
- Not resolving customer’s complaints
- Lack of manners
- Rude behaviour
- Lack of follow through
If you are not sure, you can always ask for customer feedback. Feedbacks are a great way for you to understand your customers.
Most customers would love to leave a detailed feedback. As a business owner, you can take that opportunity to learn and improve your business and service.
It is crucial for you to pay special attention towards serving your customers and make them feel special.
When they feel special and treated well, they will be more than happy to keep coming back and recommend your restaurant to their family and friends.
#7. Poor Food Quality
This goes without saying. With so many competition out there, one of the way for your restaurant to stand out is to serve good quality food.
Customers expect it and when you serve them mediocre food, they will treat your place as just any other normal place they go to. They won’t have the desire to keep coming back.
So think for a minute and decide whether you serve good quality food. If not, it is time to go back to the drawing board and figure out how you can set a higher standard for your restaurant in terms of food quality.
It could mean hiring experienced cooks who understands the process of preparing quality food consistently, purchasing higher quality ingredients, changing up your menu, tracking your sales data, asking for feedbacks from customers as well as from your own staffs, and many more.
Conclusion
As business owner, you need customers in order to continue to thrive and grow your business. It is crucial that you take a step back and analyse your restaurant’s situation. If you do have these traits and customers are avoiding your restaurant, then you need to address the problems fast.
Remember, it is harder and cost a lot more to acquire new customers compared to having repeat customers.
Now you know why your customers are avoiding your restaurant. It is time you take fast actions to bring customers to your restaurant and make them loyal to you. One of the best way to do this is by streamlining your operations and restaurant management.
With Slurp! POS, you can automate a lot of your restaurant operations so can focus more on bringing value and quality service to your customers.
Learn more about Slurp! POS by signing up for a FREE demo today at: https://getslurp.com
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