BooRah - Inside the Buzz

There’s nothing like talking with a bunch of restaurant owners to gain a different perspective on the Internet. Sitting in an office on the Internet is about as far away from the realities of running a restaurant as you can get. With 50 or 100 hungry customers waiting to be served a nice meal and pay you in cash (or credit card) for it, where are you going to focus your attention?

An observant restaurant owner will learn a lot more about whether or not diners are enjoying his/her restaurant by watching them, or talking with them, than anything on the Internet will tell them. And certainly building your business and garnering the most positive-word-of-mouth starts with making your current customers ecstatic.

In this context then, it’s not surprising that some restaurant owners take offense to the “drive-by shooting” nature of online reviews — from their perspective, a lot of reviews are unjust, unfair, written only to gain social “status” on a review site, or even made-up slam pieces written by their competitors. What I’ve heard from restaurant owners is that they’d really like a way to engage WITH their customers better, not combat them in an anonymous fashion.

And restaurant owners are willing to reward these ongoing relationships and dialogs, with loyalty programs like Beach Chalet’s free dinner for two, Caprino’s free $25 gift certificate, to discounted offers like Oola’s.

What each of these restaurants knows is that building frequent, loyal customers — and rewarding those customers for their loyalty — is one of the best ways to build their businesses.

This entry was posted by Eric Moyer on Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 at 1:50 pm and is filed under BooRah. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.