By Jon Morgan, Contributor
Restaurants live and die by the power of mints. You read that right; let me explain. There was a study on mint-giving. Researchers sought to find out the effects of offering mints to restaurant customers on customer satisfaction. The result was shocking, to say the least. Offering mints led to a 20% increase in customer tips and customer satisfaction. We can assume these people went back and dined in the restaurant again.
In other words, good and personalized customer service yielded a positive impact for the restaurant business. Customer service is the act of giving support to a consumer before, during and after a purchase. In the restaurant business, ultimately, customer service can help increase customer loyalty and help you get glowing reviews. Those, in turn, can help you get more customers, too.
Nowadays, you don’t only interact with your customers on a face-to-face basis. You also interact with them online because of increased digital engagement. That’s why apart from good offline customer service, good online customer service is a must.
In this article, you’ll learn four ways to improve your restaurant’s online customer service.
1. Offer Live Chat Support
Nothing frustrates your customer more than having to struggle to contact you. So, make it easy for them to reach you. That means providing support also on a channel they can easily access. Offering live chat support is a popular way of providing online customer service.
Pistachio Cafe--featured above—knows how to use live chat to its advantage. Right off the bat you can see their live chat feature on the homepage. Customers only need to click on the chat icon to air their concerns. They can easily get answers to their questions, too, unlike if they sent their customer queries via email.
To set up live chat on your website, start by picking an application. With Tidio, for instance, after creating your free account, you’d have to proceed with the following steps.
Customize the chat widget and add the code snippet provided to your website.
Navigate to the settings page. Set operating hours before downloading the desktop and mobile application
Integrate the app to your email service provider and social media profiles
Import email contacts before customizing your pop-up message
For the past few years, live chat has consistently led as the number one channel for online customer service. In fact, 41% of customers prefer live chat over every other channel. Use that to your advantage.
2. Include a FAQ Section
FAQs are a great online customer service option for helping customers find answers to common customer questions. They’re easy to access and eliminate the need for the customer to call your toll-free number for help. That’s a good thing. Ultimately, you want to minimize the effort a customer has to put in to get answers. That's because the more effort they have to put in, the higher their dissatisfaction.
The Caravella restaurant is a great example of a restaurant with a good updated and informative FAQ page. It answers common questions made by customers.
Don’t have a FAQ page or you already have one but you don’t know how to update it? Start by reaching out to your current customers and finding out what questions they want answered. Talk to your staff, too, and find out the most common queries they get. You can also review your competitors’ websites and find out what questions they’re answering.
In your FAQ page, overcome common sales objections, too. For example, specify your payment options. Emphasize your short service wait times. Explain, too, that you use organic and fresh ingredients. You can also provide information on your ingredients to safeguard against food allergies.
Link to your “contact us” page or live chat software in case your online guests have questions that aren’t answered in the FAQ page. To make your FAQ more effective, categorize the questions into different categories.
Additionally, FAQs should be accessible on every channel. Apart from your website, they should be found in your marketing emails and even on social media. Make sure you regularly reach out to your customers so you can make the necessary updates to your FAQ section.
Running a restaurant business doesn’t just require an understanding of how to file taxes or of learning how to handle a LLC lawsuit. If you want your business to succeed, you need to know how to provide stellar online customer service, too. A good and regularly-updated FAQ section can help you provide this.
3. Tap into Social Media
Another tool in your online customer service arsenal is social media. Social media is great for marketing your offers, but the sweet spot is when you combine it with an effective online customer service strategy. That's when you can grow the lifetime value of a customer.
So how do you use social media to improve social customer service?
Start by being everywhere. That means one social media account doesn’t cut it. You have to check where your customers are so you can be there, too. Begin with popular platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.
The next step is to regularly update your social media profiles. That includes changes to things like operating hours, specials, menu, and so on.
Once you have your multiple social media accounts set up, expect customers to contact you through them if they have concerns or just want to reach out.
When that happens, you should strive to improve your response times on social media. Your social media customer service agents – be it yourself or one of your staff -- must respond quickly, accurately, empathetically, and be straightforward. Create a pre-written message for each platform to reduce response times. It lets your customer feel heard and gives you enough time to answer them.
Here are a few tips when talking to your customers on social media:
Create great first impressions. You do that by using the right positive phrases and words.
Personalize conversations. Leveraging what you know about a follower or subscriber to create targeted campaigns. Including their first name, purchase history, location, activity logs, etc. It helps build trust and improves customer satisfaction.
Empathize with guests. Show them that you understand their wants and needs. Moreover, it helps you create a deeper connection during the conversation.
Lastly, make it a point to track mentions of your restaurant. Take a page from marketers and use social listening tools like Mention or set up Google alerts. These tools allow you to track what your guests are saying about your business online. That can help you respond to them immediately and address their concerns, if any.
4. Use Online Self-Service Restaurant System
You want to help your customers help themselves. Why? It helps reduce the work of your staff. Moreover, 70% of your customers expect you to have a self-service restaurant option on your website.
American Cut--a steakhouse—offers a great example of how you can enable online reservations.
They have a simple but effective design that makes it easy for a customer to pick a reservation date and time. Customers can also declare how many guests they’ll bring. That way everyone is guaranteed a seat.
When you make it easy for your customers to make reservations, you make them happy. You make your restaurant staff happy, too. They don’t have to spend so much time talking to the customer to get their reservations. All they need to do is check the system and take note of the reservation data there.
Wrapping Up
At the end of the day, great online customer service is about creating customer-centric experiences. Doing so will help you increase brand loyalty, provide repeat business, and boost referrals to your restaurant.
You learned four ways you can improve your online customer service for your restaurant business. Add live chat support, use social media, and create and update your FAQ section. Finally, offer self-service restaurant options.
These strategies will help you do one thing: Keep your restaurant at the top of your customer’s mind. Follow these tips and you’ll significantly improve the lifetime value of each customer and draw in more people.
About the Author
Jon is the founder of two successful e-commerce and SaaS businesses. He's passionate about sharing what he has learned from working with business owners through Venture Smarter.
