Lessons from restaurants
I recently had the great pleasure of contacting over 40 restaurants to do some on-the-spot fact-checking for a content piece.
A couple things I learned along the way:
A website—particularly one for a restaurant—is made to accomplish three very important things:
To help users find the location & contact info
To help users discover your brand and how it makes them feel
To help users realize if they want to pay you a visit, by looking at photos of the food you serve and the venue it’s in.
Everything else—shopping carts, gift cards, prices, etc.—is an abstraction and should be omitted. No one is coming to your site to buy a pound of oysters—sorry!
…
If someone is calling your landline number, they’re doing so to accomplish one of three goals:
Find out your hours or location.
Make a reservation.
Ask a specific question.
And, if that’s the case, they better be greeted by a human on the other end. Preferably as fast as humanly possible.
Also: given the chance that someone might be calling to ask a specific question—do you have gluten-free options? is your patio dog-friendly?—it’s pretty pertinent to ensure that whoever answers the phone has an answer to these questions.
Sadly, telling a customer to email their manager just won’t cut it.