Consumers are increasing their spending on food and the F&B industry is playing an even bigger role in Singapore’s economy than before. With the increase in competition in recent years, aside from serving high quality dishes, food joints are starting to place more emphasis on maintaining and improving service standards. Knowing what customers want will not only ensure that they will have a better dining experience, but also help your restaurant gain a loyal following in the long run. Here are what customers expect in a restaurant!
1. Customers want quality, not just discounts
Although several restaurants offer discounts, customer satisfaction is not significantly affected by discounted prices. Instead, the quality of the food and experience plays a bigger role. Customers’ perceived product quality, such as the ambience, the facilities and accessibility affects the level of satisfaction to a larger extent. However, this does not mean that offering sales and discounts at a restaurant is obsolete – it still remains as a strong pull for customers.
To improve service quality, it is important that restaurants create an innovative and refreshing dining experience. For example, the use of automation in restaurants would create a new dining experience for customers as the ordering process becomes quicker and more efficient. In doing so, it would be easier to increase customer satisfaction and the number of loyal diners.
2. Service Speed
It is revealed that for customers who did not have dining reservations, the waiting time to get seated and the time taken to receive food are the focal touchpoints important to quality. Several restaurants have employed the use of automation, such as wireless pagers to increase efficiency and shorten waiting times.
For customers with reservations, the standard of the food items would be the main driver for satisfaction. Hence, different customers would have different expectations when it comes to quality and satisfaction. The onus is on restaurateurs to identify and to cater to the needs and expectations of each customer to provide for the best dining experience, from food quality to service quality.
3. Companies to resolve complaints/feedback well
Customers also expect restaurants to receive feedback and act on them. It is shown that if a negative dining experience is shared to family or friends, it would result in significantly lower customer satisfaction. Dissatisfied customers are less likely to dine again and are would not recommend it to others too.
Therefore, restaurateurs should use non-traditional channels to gather feedback. At present, only 5% of unhappy customers offer post-purchase feedback. By using more avenues to gather feedback such as allowing customers to give feedback via email apart from the traditional feedback forms would allow for more feedback to be gathered. It is vital for restaurants to look at the feedback given and that they take necessary steps to ensure that customer concerns are met. 97% of customers are likely to be more loyal to a company that implements their feedback.
Statistics referenced from: Customer Satisfaction Index of Singapore 2015
