Why You Have to Know Your Customers

As a restaurant director, one of the most important things I have learned through my experience is that you have to know your customers—and I don’t mean knowing their names (although that never hurts with regulars, depending on your restaurant demographic!) but rather knowing that all-too-essential demographic information that can lead you to improve your customer experience and sales. Let’s take a closer look at why you have to know your customers in the restaurant industry.

What Does It Mean to "Know" Your Customer?

First, let’s talk ab it about what it means to “know” your customer. In this context, knowing your customer means knowing about the type of experience they are looking for from your restaurant—as well as what they are looking for from restaurants as a whole. Why did they choose your restaurant? What can you do to keep them returning? How can you draw in more customers from competing businesses? The information that leads you to these answers is the information you want to use to improve your customer experience.

Likes and Dislikes

Your customer’s likes and dislikes will form the basis of “knowing” them in a restaurant sense. Their likes and dislikes extend to everything they enjoy or don’t enjoy about a restaurant experience, including but not limited to:

• Food/menu
• Customer service
• Interaction with employees (host/hostess, servers, etc)
• Décor
• Ambience
• Prices
• Overall customer experience

Every customer is different. Some customers, for instance, may prefer a casual ambiance with friendly interaction between servers and guests; while others prefer something more formal and hands-off. It all depends on your customer demographic; the more you understand about what they like and don’t like, the better you can cater towards these types of nuances. 

Collecting Feedback

It’s all well and good to think about what customers like and don’t like, but how do you know for sure? The primary way you can “know” your customers is to get their honest feedback. Feedback is surprisingly difficult to get at times, especially since you want customers to be completely honest and not alter their feedback based on any preconceived notions regarding your expectations.

One of the best ways to get feedback is through online surveys. Online surveys take the heat off the customers, who won’t feel pressured to give feedback right away in person; this also lets them take a breather from their experience to reflect on what they genuinely liked/didn’t like or what they like/don’t like at restaurants as a whole. 

How to Take Customers Into Consideration

Once you have the feedback, you need to translate the information you get from it into consideration for your customers. The best way to do this is lay out all the feedback you can into a database or some other format that lets you get a broad overview of the feedback received. What feedback seems most common? Addressing these types of common customer complaints—or even preferences—is the best way to take customers into consideration.

Remember: knowing your customers is a vital part of owning and running any restaurant. Don’t forget to keep customers in mind every step of the way!