3 Reasons Why Your Restaurant Is Losing Customers

People love food. So food should practically sell itself, right? Not so. With so many different eateries out there, business owners in the restaurant industry are regularly hit with stiff competition. Needless to say, it’s important for them to provide members of the general public with reasons to choose their restaurants over others. But how does one go about attracting hungry customers? What can restaurateurs do to not lose customers to their competitors?

Without being able to adequately answer these questions, restaurant owners can find themselves in positions where they are losing business. The first, and likely most obvious, solution is to ensure that excellent food is being served. If people don’t like the food you serve, nothing else can bring them back to your restaurant. But that should be the easy part. If your food is great and you’re still losing customers, what could be going wrong?

Here are three reasons why your restaurant is losing customers:

1. You’re not treating your employees very well. Restaurants are part of the service industry. It goes without saying that customers expect warm and friendly service from the places where they go to eat. If you’re not treating your employees with respect, you’ll likely have bad customer service and/or a high turnover of workers. That doesn’t help to establish your restaurant as a place where people will feel welcome.

On Inc.com, Jeff Haden highlights the importance of making your restaurant very people-friendly. “Since relationships are the lifeblood of a small business, don\’t rotate salespeople, customer service reps, or key contacts unless you have to,” he advises, “Do everything possible to protect and foster the relationships your employees forge. Employees are rarely interchangeable where strong business relationships with customers are concerned.”

2. You neglect the importance of keeping a tidy place. If there’s anything that trumps the taste of the food being served, it’s the condition of the location where the food is being served. What’s worse than a dirty and untidy restaurant? It immediately conjures up images of food being prepared in unsanitary conditions. It cannot be stated any clearer: keep your restaurant clean! Otherwise, your customers will head for the doors and not come back.

On FieldAgent.com, Chris Medenwald writes that poor housekeeping is a top reason why restaurants lose customers. “After studying 373 separate service failures reported by restaurant customers, researchers Beth Chung and K.D. Hoffman concluded that, in restaurants as well as life, cleanliness is next to godliness,” he informs, “Chung and Hoffman warned restaurants against, for instance, bad smells and unsanitary conditions.”

3. You only accept cash. These days, restaurants and wireless POS terminals practically go hand in hand. At least, it seems that way at most respectable establishments. Pay at the table solutions make it so easy for people to eat to their heart’s content and then pay without having to worry about carrying cash on their persons. If you only accept cash, you’re not only turning away countless card-carrying customers, but you’re aggravating them as well.

This only leads to bad word-of-mouth promotion – which no one wants. Dave Infante of Thrillist.com provides the perfect example. “Cash-only restaurants are an infuriating inconvenience to the customer,” he writes, “They don\’t just want you to give them cash, they want you to want to give them cash. Cash-only restaurants are the needy girlfriend of the restaurant industry, and like the undateable slob that I am, I can\’t quite shove off.”

Let’s not have your restaurant lose any more of its customers! For information on how Canadian POS Corporation can have your restaurant set up a new pay at table solution, give us a call at 1-877-748-2884 or email us at info@localhost.