Sit in Your Customer’s Seat

When your restaurant is open where are you most often? Most restaurant owners are usually in the office or the kitchen, once in a while walking around the restaurant. How many times do you sit in the dining room or bar like a customer during the night?

Do it and you might get a perspective that might make a major difference in the way you run, market, and understand your restaurant in 2012. The perspective of your customer. When I do it I make sure the server rings my food through just like a customer with no special modifiers identifying the order as mine, I sit in different places to get an appreciation of what we could do better for each table, and I watch other servers how they handle their tables.

All of those things lead me to understand and run the restaurant better, and that is nothing to shake a stick at, but how does it help me in my restaurant marketing duties? Well it is all about the trust factor, and the power of example with my guests. If I am there eating and drinking in the diningroom, it shows I am proud of the product to my customers. Often times they ask their server what I am eating and order it themselves.

Contrast that to a place where the owner is barely visible, and think of how much a different feeling that is. Restaurant marketing isn’t just about twitter updates, email marketing, and blog posts, restaurant marketing also includes how you carry yourself and what your customers see from you along the way.

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