Improving Customer Online Experience For Your Restaurant *

You website is often the gateway to your brick and mortar restaurant. It’s often the “door” your customers first walk through.

Because of this, you want to make sure your restaurant’s website is performing as well as it can be.

You want to always be working on improving customer experience for your restaurant online. In this article, we’re going to tell you how and give you some tips.

How to Boost Customer Satisfaction

Sam Walton said, “The goal of a company is to have customer service that is not just the best but legendary.”

While you know this is key when your guests are at your restaurant, did you know it’s just as important when visitors land on your website?

With massive competition in the restaurant industry, it’s up to you to make your restaurant website stand apart and shine where others don’t.

You can boost customer satisfaction and improve their overall customer experience with your restaurant starting online. It should flow nicely right into your restaurant.

Create a Customer Experience Strategy

When building or refreshing your restaurant website, keep the following things in mind:

• Know what you want to communicate with website visitors. Some good ideas include an easy-to-find phone number, address, and hours. Your online menu is key so customers can order online.
• Understand and know your customers. An older clientele, and you’ll want bigger fonts. Kid-friendly, and you’ll want an experience that conveys that.
• Find out what your customers think. Ask them in-person or use a survey. Ask your employees, too. Have friends and family walk through your website to see how easy it is to use.
• Create high performing landing pages and test them. Revise them as needed.

Improve Website Customer Experience

When you think of customer experience, you probably think of great customer service versus bad customer service.

While this is easy to separate inside your restaurant, it’s important to also incorporate that same customer service on your restaurant website.

Your customers are quick to remember your great service, but they can recall poor service even quicker.

Imagine a potential customer heads to your website, and they find poor navigation and a non-existent or hard to find address. You’ll find they quickly bounce off because of the poor customer service.

So, it pays to improve your website’s overall customer experience, so you have happy customers in your gateway.

By improving the customer experience, your business will grow faster. Plus, you’ll end up with brand ambassadors for your restaurant. (tweet this)

This is important for restaurants because word of mouth can catapult your restaurant to the next level.

Revise your website so it works to build strong relationships. Make the navigation easy and intuitive. Place important information front and center. Ensure that people can order food from you online with ease.

It’s also vital that your website is mobile-friendly and resolves perfectly on different screen sizes. It’s got to be friendly for all users.

Finally, make sure to optimize your page speed. Customers will have a horrible experience if your site loads too slowly.

Consider running usability tests on your website to improve the customer experience. This way you’ll learn if others think your website is as user-friendly as you do.

Respond to Comments and Complaints

The next thing you want to think about when it comes to the overall customer experience for your restaurant online is the way you handle comments as well as complaints.

While this may be on your website, it can also be on social media and through platforms like Google reviews.

Best practices suggest you respond to every review, both positive and negative, in a timely manner.

How do you respond to complaints and negative comments? You respond with empathy and understanding. Whether you were in the right or in the wrong, it pays to acknowledge your customers’ feelings and do what you can to make things right.

For online reviews, the way you respond can affect other users’ experience because they can read the reviews. So, as you respond, remember that your comments are for more than just the one customer.

Incorporate Chatbots

Another way to improve customer experience on your website is by incorporating chatbots.

This service can help answer the more immediate needs of your customers, allowing you to provide customer service all day and night long.

Chatbots improve customer experience by allowing you to respond very quickly to questions, especially when people aren’t available.

Emphasize Customer Reviews

Capitalize on your positive customer reviews.

If you have great reviews on Google, make sure they show up on your website. Do the same with Facebook reviews.

By highlighting your reviews on your website, you’ll improve the customer experience. Why? Your potential customers want to see the social proof. They want to know others think highly of your restaurant.

What’s more, Google just might put your website higher in search engine results if you have reviews on your web pages.

Place your customer reviews strategically across your website. For example, if you have great reviews for a specific menu item, make sure they show up on that page.

You enhance the customer experience with reviews because you’re helping your diners make better decisions based on your reviews. (tweet this)

In addition, positive reviews also increase the credibility of your restaurant and help you rise above the competition.

Make It Easy to Buy from You

One more thing you can do to improve the customer experience is make your online menu and cart as easy as possible.

A bad online ordering experience does nothing for your website’s overall usability.

Don’t waste your customers’ time by asking for too much information or by asking for too many item confirmations before the final purchase. Ditch the pop-ups and don’t include too many additional offers.

Enlist others to try out your cart for you. Make sure they think it’s easy before launching or revising.

Final Thoughts

To really improve customer experience for your restaurant online, you must first know what your customers want and need. Next, you want to know how they interact with you online.

This starts with your restaurant’s website and also encompasses online reviews and social media.

Your goal is to create a seamless experience for users that is quick, responsive, and understands their needs.

You want to create relationships and connections with current and potential customers by providing them with a great online customer experience.

At Restaurant Engine, not only do we create great, responsive websites, but you can count on us to create a website that drives business to your restaurant and edges you above the competition by using mobile-friendly design with a terrific user experience. Ready to take the plunge and create a website with an online menu, blog, and beautiful photos? Get your free website consultation today!

Images: Pablo Merchán Montes and Spencer Davis on Unsplash