Restaurant Experience

Discover how to use the power of memory to keep your customers coming back

Consumer Behavior Customer experience December 25, 2019

Elevate your customers’ ‘state’ of mind and you will keep them coming back.

One of the 4 steps of the FAST method mentioned by Jim Kwik to remember ANYTHING is the “State” step, which is basically your state of mind when you are ‘learning’.

How are you feeling? Are you bored? Are you excited? Are you surprised? Are you amused?

I wanted to contemplate at that step - that “State” one, and how we can use it to enhance the memorability of customers to a specific experience…

… and so I stopped for a moment and tried to remember which restaurants I have been to that delivered an elevated emotional state - that made my experience so memorable and kept it always on top of mind.

Hmm…

Do food ordering apps help gain or lose customers?

Customer experience December 23, 2019

I guess when it comes to ordering food, we don’t want to think much. All we want is to get our food as soon as possible, like right now, at this exact moment, especially when we are hungry.

Before online food ordering apps or websites, we used to order by calling a phone number, and so the popular chains started to create a shorter version of that number so it’s more memorable to its customers.

Now, I, like many others rely on food ordering apps. In fact, I don’t want to come near the phone at any point for my order. I am a millennial and I guess it became part of how our generation likes to order food. We weren’t brought up using the app, but we sure as hell got used to it.

So here is a food ordering story from today…

Exceptional customer experience starts with the discovery – Ingredients restaurant

Customer experience December 21, 2019

Exceptional customer experience starts with the discovery
Exceptional customer experience is relative to what the customer’s baseline and expectations are.

The same exact experience could be truly exceptional to one customer, while more or less average to another customer who might have different previous experiences.

And, so the same applies to me as a customer. I have dined in restaurants a lot in the past few years, and some of my outings, especially when it’s a big group, could end-up in a buffet. I know that buffets are even more popular during the month of Ramadan, where practically everyone gets to eat at the same exact time.
This week, I was part of a work workshop, which also happened to be in a Hotel, Anantara Eastern Mangroves Abu Dhabi.

We had lunch there in a place called Ingredients, and the restaurant offered a buffet lunch.

My experience was a bit different than the buffets I have been used to. I was at some point surprised, pleasantly surprised, and so I want to walk you through my thought process, as a customer for my restaurant customer experience with Ingredients.

My restaurant experience with Poke & Co

Consumer Behavior Customer experience December 14, 2019

A couple of months ago I wrote a blog post in neuromarketing blog about the restaurant experience, and how you can use consumer behavior principles and embed them within this experience to get the best out of it as a restaurant owner.

Read: Customer experience tweaks that boost restaurant results

… and so today, I have decided to go through the steps of the restaurant experience as a customer in one of my very favorite restaurants here in Dubai, which is Poke & Co.

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Step 1: Discovery - Word-of-mouth
It started off contemplating with my team at work on our options for lunch. It was too hot for us to go out and grab something, and so one of my work friends suggested we order from Poke & Co.

I was like, “What is that?”

My friend told me it’s sushi in a bowl.