Why We Eat Out – The Science of Dining

Getting in touch with your inner customer

One of the most unfortunate things that happen when you open a business is that you lose touch with what it would be like to be your customer. As the owner or manager, it is nearly impossible to get the same experience that a paying customer would have in your establishment. Your service will be just a little (or a lot) better. The kitchen will take extra care with your food. Inevitably, you'll mix in a little shop talk that will give you a much larger share of your staff's time than any customer will ever garner. All of this assumes that you actually go in and attempt to dine like a mere mortal.

So what can you do to get a great perspective on what's really going on in your four walls?

Watch your guests

First of all, pick up a copy of Paco Underhill's excellent book Why We Buy - The Science of Shopping. While the book focuses on retail, there are tremendous lessons we can learn from it. In the first pages of the book, he compares his research into the retail experience to an anthropologist studying another culture. Simply by reading the book you'll find yourself becoming much more observant of your own experiences and perceptions. Most notably, you'll begin to see how those experiences and perceptions are being engineered (or ignored) by the retailers you frequent.

Next, turn your newly tuned awareness to your own restaurant and just observe the behavior of guests and potential guests. Get a clipboard and take some notes. Start down the street from your business. Can you see the signage? Is it clear that you’re a restaurant? Walk towards your restaurant. Is the area in front of your restaurant free of debris? Can you see inside your restaurant from the street? Are the windows clean? What do you see when you look in the windows? Stand and watch for a while. Do people on the street notice your restaurant?

Keep watching. What happens when they decide to visit your restaurant? Follow them inside. Are they greeted at the door? Are they engaged by the person showing them to their table? Once they’re seated, do they open their menus right away? Do they look around? When they look at the menu, where do their eyes go to first? Has someone come to the table to ask if they’d like a beverage? What beverage did the server suggest?

You get the idea. You really need to supercharge your powers of observation in order to find out how your guests see your establishment.

Envision the experience

Once you’ve observed the experience your customers are having, decide what type of experience you’d like them to have.

Start over and go back down the street. This time, imagine what you’d like them to see. Look at your competitors, both the successful ones and the ones you’re betting against. How does your location measure up? What could your customers see as they’re making a choice of how to spend their hardearned money? Write down every interaction point that could be improved from a pothole in the parking lot that results in a wet shoe on a rainy day to the type of mints that arrive with the bill at the end of the dinner. Successful restaurateurs and retailers pay attention to all of these details.

Set expectations

Now you have established “What it is” and “What it ought to be”, educate every person in your business about how they shape the buying patterns and experience of customers. This is the hardest part, but setting these expectations gives you, the owner or manager, the right to guide and criticize behavior. It also gives you the right to give praise. More importantly, the praise you give will be based on meeting the expectations you set out. This genuine praise for work well done will mean more to the employees.

These external standards will also give employees a sense of accomplishment even when you’re not there to pat them on the back. By improving the guest experience in your establishment, you’ll also improve the experience of your employees. That satisfaction can lead to higher performance and less turnover.