The restaurant industry may have weathered a global pandemic, but consumer expectations continue to change – and the restaurant customer experience has had to change in step.
You might think serving consistently top-notch food is all it takes, but the customer experience in restaurants is now a much broader field. It encapsulates everything from menu choice and service, to payment options and brand consistency (on and offline).
The cumulative, resulting experience is what makes customers return again and again – and what drives high customer satisfaction and positive reviews that deliver recommendations.
Deliver better in-person experiences with Qualtrics® Location Experience Hub
The best businesses in this space will be the ones able to design and curate experiences that customers crave, and evolve alongside attitudes and behaviors. Here’s everything you need to know…
What is restaurant customer experience?
Restaurants are not defined solely by the dishes they create. The customer experience in restaurants has become increasingly complex, and is now influenced a lot more than it used to be by a raft of other factors – like accuracy of order, speed of service, friendliness of staff, and cleanliness.
Factors that can affect the restaurant experience include:
- Customer service
- Listening to your customers, measuring sentiment, and taking action
- The ordering process – dine-in, in-app, and pick-up windows
- Convenience when making reservations (casual and fine dining restaurants)
- Order accuracy
- Payment and payment facilitation
- Menu and food choices available
- Food quality
- Atmosphere
- Cleanliness and tidiness
- Restaurant format
- Music
- Lighting
- Takeaway and delivery options
- The setting
Why is restaurant customer experience important?
Positive experiences are what make your customers trust you, return for more, and recommend you to their friends, family, and in online reviews or social media. Providing excellent customer service consistently is key to building customer loyalty and fostering repeat visits.
Businesses need to design the experiences customers want, and continuously improve them as attitudes and behaviors evolve if they are to remain competitive.
How to improve the customer experience in restaurants
Improving the customer experience in restaurants comes down to measuring current sentiment, listening to your customers, and taking action to solve the problems highlighted. Does the food taste good? Is the order taken correctly? Is the service slow?
Here are a few suggestions to improve the customer experience:
Make convenience king – if that’s what your customers expect
You need to be able to feed your patrons in whichever way suits them. Offering takeaway, whether directly with the restaurant or in-app through providers like DoorDash, can be the difference between a customer choosing your restaurant and a competitor. But remember, stay true to the experience your customers expect.
If you’re a fine dining restaurant, they don’t want drive-through, they’re coming to savor every bite. That means people want a convenient way to reserve a table – and easy options for adding special touches on special occasions.
Create a frictionless customer experience
Customers are tech-savvy – and they expect restaurants to follow suit. All touchpoints – from the point of sale to the menu provision – should take into account the latest restaurant technology to make ordering, payment, and reviews as frictionless as possible.
You’ll probably find that the number of touchpoints you have to consider is ever-expanding. That’s especially true for quick-serve and fast food venues. Where there was once either eat-in or takeaway, restaurants now also have BOPIS (buy online, pickup in store) options, kiosk ordering, proprietary and third party delivery app options – all representing customers that want to be treated equally. “Phygital” is the new norm – a blending of in-person and online that needs to feel connected and cohesive.
This channel explosion makes the experience so much more complex to manage than it used to be, requiring an omnichannel approach that’s historically been the remit of consumer retail brands.
Meeting these expanding customer expectations means using digital tools that can connect the different parts of the experience. With the right software – like Qualtrics Location Experience Hub – restaurant managers can garner insights that help drive consistency and efficiency, alongside memorable, on-brand experiences that keep customers coming back. This is all about providing seamless transitions, personalization and differentiated value as customers move between in-person dining, digital, social, support and third-party channels.
Give managers the tools they need
Empowering restaurant managers with the right insights at the right time can make all the difference in a restaurant environment. With insights at a hyperlocal level – for customer opinions and employee experiences – managers can make informed decisions about what needs to change and what’s landing as intended.
Understanding what drives negative reviews is one thing, but with the right software working behind the scenes, restaurants can see how the changes they make directly affect service recovery – and what that means for the bottom line.
Ensure employees are engaged
The restaurant industry can often see high turnover, meaning that restaurants need to keep their employees engaged and invested to retain them. When employees are satisfied, their investment in the business increases – and their dedication to providing a great customer experience responds in kind.
Getting feedback not just from your customers, but also from your staff, can help to illustrate where your customer service might be failing. Your staff is on the frontline and hears things first hand. Improving the customer experience starts with providing your team with the tools they need to succeed, so take their feedback into account and empower them to create the experience your customers expect.
It’s important to remember that high employee turnover has knock-on effects – like high training costs and poor customer experiences. Using employee experience tools that can proactively track and improve your teams’ working environment can keep people feeling empowered and motivated to stay.
Use data to inform your actions
With the restaurant experience crossing multiple channels, collecting customer feedback to understand how the experience can be improved has never been more important. Collecting feedback manually can take too much time – and it might mean you miss negative sentiment expressed in online spaces you don’t control, such as social media posts or online review sites.
A digital platform for collecting and processing customer data can help you uncover valuable insights and send them to your teams for action, significantly enhancing your ability to improve customer service and the overall dining experience.
AI-powered tools, for example, can scour third party review sites, social posts, email inboxes, survey responses, customer support calls and more, to discern what people are saying about your restaurant – and where the experience gaps lie. This allows you to identify recurring themes and take action to exceed customer expectations. It can take you from rear-view reporting to real-time understanding.
This is especially important in today’s review-driven decision making, where customer satisfaction hinges on how well you respond to feedback. Customers are more carefully considering how and where to spend their money, and the abundance of online reviews makes it easier than ever to evaluate options.
That means two things:
- You need to be able to proactively analyze reviews across platforms to know where you’re going wrong.
- You need to be able to respond to your online reviews and survey responses in a timely, personalized, and on-brand manner, so your customers feel valued and heard.
A lack of personalized, on-brand response harms your restaurant’s brand reputation.
From resolving location-based issues to sorting out wider pain points across the customer experience, AI-enabled text analytics can help you more easily see trends and take action to improve service speed and operational efficiency.
Focus on customer service
Offering attentive and personalized service can be the difference between an okay restaurant and a successful one. No matter the scenario – responding to negative reviews, offering in-restaurant customer service, or messaging in response to online feedback you’ve requested – responsive and proactive service is key to creating positive dining experiences that turn satisfied customers into loyal patrons.
Thanking customers for their time and feedback, quickly resolving issues, being consistently professional, and offering helpful recommendations are good ways to engage your customers. This attentive service might be the reason why customers choose to return – and to recommend.
Start a loyalty program and offer personal rewards
An easy way to encourage repeat customers and to make them feel more invested in your restaurant is to offer a loyalty program. Investing in customer engagement solutions – such as rewards for times visited, birthday gifts, early access to special events, and more – can help you to develop a closer relationship with your customers.
How they feel about your restaurant’s brand is important, and a loyalty program can help customers to feel as though they personally have a stake in returning for more. Remember to optimize the rewards based on your customers’ personal preferences for the best results, while also streamlining operations and improving the payment process for a seamless experience.
Great restaurant customer experience example: KFC
With 32,000 restaurants across more than 150 countries – and a new branch opening every 3.5 hours – KFC has the widest global footprint of any quick service restaurant (QSR) brand. But that scale means the pressure is on to provide a consistent, cohesive restaurant experience.
When you think back to just a handful of years ago, restaurant managers only needed to focus on two order channels – the front counter and the drive-thru. Today there are many more, including kiosks, online reviews, in-app and delivery aggregators like Uber Eats or Doordash – which even differ across markets.
Restaurant managers are drowning in data, but they often lack a single, omnichannel view that can bring all this disparate information together.
With Qualtrics, KFC has implemented a global omnichannel experience management program that brings in structured and unstructured feedback from post-transaction surveys – in-store and online, including delivery platforms specific to each market.
These customer insights are made available to KFC’s employees in Qualtrics dashboards specific to their role and location, combining feedback from across channels, and instantly surfacing issues that need to be fixed.
For example, restaurant managers get insight into customer feedback specific to their location, whereas market managers and executives see insights at a business unit level. That means employees are always empowered to focus on where they can have the greatest impact.
By connecting feedback across every touchpoint, giving teams insights they can use right away, and using AI to stay ahead of customer needs, Qualtrics has enabled an experience management program that has increased customer feedback by 300%.
Watch KFC speak at X4 SLC 2025 in our on-demand webinar
Deliver consistently exceptional experiences at every location
In today’s experience-driven dining landscape, the restaurants that stand out are those that create seamless, connected experiences across every channel and location. Achieving this requires more than intuition – it demands real-time insights, localized actions, and scalable solutions. With Qualtrics Location Experience Hub, restaurant brands can unify feedback from every touchpoint, empower location managers to take targeted action, and ensure each location lives up to the brand’s promise.
Deliver better in-person experiences with Qualtrics® Location Experience Hub