Don’t seat your customers by the loo!

Being a customer service obsessed type of blogger, I couldn’t help notice on www.squaremeal.co.uk (we're the web agency behind the site!) that the newly voted restaurant of the year Scott’s, was described by the editors as a ‘customer-driven restaurant par excellence.’

This got me thinking. There are a lot of parallels between websites and restaurants. A lot of websites are designed brilliantly, look fantastic, but once you’re in them, the menu, the service and the costs can all be disappointing and you may end up swearing never to visit again.

Whereas the best restaurants and websites are always designed around the customer, with a well thought out ‘customer engagement strategy’. For restaurants this means great food, service, ambience and price. For websites it means roughly the same, a great product or service, lots of interactive functionality, ease of navigation and good value. To achieve this you have to understand the psychology of the customer and provide the experience they would ideally like to have. On websites, certain key elements like event calendars need to be developed to build the relationship. Website owners often feel they don’t have time to build these types of functions around the customer but without them, customers are going to be sitting at the equivalent of the dodgy table by the loo door.

The CEO of Scott’s, Des McDonald, on receiving the award was quoted as saying that everything hinges on “attention to detail on a daily basis” – easy to say but not easy to deliver, which is why he’s holding the gong I guess.

Discount vouchers can be dangerous to your brand health

One side effect of Le Crunch (resorting to French for a fresh descriptor) is a boon in the discount voucher market online which has helped keep restaurants like Pizza Express full in the dog days of January with two for one and three courses for £10 offers.

Playing the discount voucher game is therefore an attractive option for restaurateurs with a cold wind on their back but there is a danger that in the frenzy to keep tables full, established, loyal customers may be ignored. If no distinction is made between them and the fly-by-night, voucher clutching one timers, what are you saying to your regular customers about how you value them?

Thankfully, it’s not an either or situation, restaurateurs can combine discount vouchers with rewards for loyalty. This could be as simple as mailing your existing customer base and offering a reward for passing on the discount vouchers to friends. Email and social media make this a wildfire solution for spreading the word if the offer is attractive enough. However it is executed, rewarding customer loyalty, rather than purely commoditising the offer will put restaurants and other retailers using vouchers in a stronger position come the financial thaw.

UGC – Take control or unleash the beastly

I’m tempted to start another dog metaphor here but will resist. By unleashing the beastly I mean that if your site doesn’t have a facility for customer feedback, the motivated customer will go somewhere else to post unfavourable comments and then you lose the opportunity to easily respond. And like magnets, complaints attract ‘me too’ complaints and all of a sudden there’s a rash of negative comment spreading across the internet which you need teams of people to locate.

Hopefully some of the UGC will be positive but customers need encouragement to share positive comments. With any product or service we should be asking the question ‘how was it for you?’ and include the option to rate your service. No lengthy surveys, just a simple rating and optional comment box.

If you bear in mind that someone who has made a repeat purchase is much more likely to buy again and again, their comments will help you understand better those people who could become brand ambassadors – important because personal referral is the number one influencer for purchases online.

Snowy Data Silos

Some of the larger mounds of snow were causing my dog some trouble this morning and it occurred to me that the way the short legged fellow would disappear from sight periodically behind one of them was a useful metaphor for customer service online. I’ll use that I thought.

For mounds of snow, read data silos where customer history literally disappears from sight when the customer changes channels from say a company’s telephone line to their website. What you really want is for the guys on the phone to see what you’ve done online and vice versa. Nothing can be more frustrating than having to personally act as go between for departments in the same company.

The go between should really be that technology known as API – application programming interface which rather like the amoeba in o level biology, allows one application to speak to another via a sort of fibrous membrane that holds things together.

For large companies with many databases, integration of this type takes a lot of money and planning but its also achievable for smaller entities using a customer audit trail approach which means your phone call conversation is confirmed by email and also recorded on the website for future reference.

Going back to the doggy metaphor, gaining a centralised view of your customer across all channels isn’t a walk in the park, but your customers will thank you for removing obstacles between them.