Skiilight Interactive – Seattle Marketing, Web Design, and Graphic Design

Any marketing professional will tell you that your brand is defined by how your customer “feels” about your company. As a design firm, we focus heavily on closing the project and implementing our solutions flawlessly. The successful completion of a project allows our customer to be happy and for us to maintain a good working relationship. If we designed the greatest website and/or identity package but botched the implementation, our client would take that memory home with them. They would likely not recommend us – and we wouldn’t deserve to be recommended.

People go out to eat to take a break. Work is hard. Cleaning up after cooking is a chore. A trip to a restaurant (nice or not) is a treat, and the customer deserves to be treated correctly.

I was recently out with friends at a Sushi restaurant which offered a few “Rules of the House” on the front page of the menu. One of these “rules” stated that only one check will be delivered to the table, no exceptions.  That’s okay, considering my party frequently splits the check by supplying two or more credit cards, depending on how many are in said party. This night, there were four. We understood and could accomodate this “rule of the house.”

After a relaxing dinner, our bill arrived. Yet another surprise “Rule of the House” greeted us when we opened the black check holder. “No more than two credit cards allowed.” On the surface, this isn’t such a travesty, but let’s approach this from a emotional branding point of view.

The rules that management has decided to place onto the customer’s shoulders negatively effects the customer’s view of the restaurant. Because the surprise rule created a stressful situation at the very end of the night, the customer won’t be thinking about how pleasant the waiter was or possibly even how good the food was; they’ll think only of how unnecessarily difficult it was to split the check.

Building walls for your customers to scale is not the way to create a relaxing user-experience. A restaurant employs “servers.” These people are there to take care of the customer and provide the face for your brand. Since when did it become okay for the business to decide in what ways I’ll pay for the services they are obligated to perform? If you run a restaurant, stop alienating your customers and accept whatever form of payment they wish. Don’t send your customer home with a grey cloud over their head just because you want to save a few cents on your merchant services charge. Your brand might not be the only thing that suffers.

Restaurant owners take note: Word of mouth now extends worldwide. A customer burned will tell the world with the help of Yelp!, Judy’s Book, City Search, etc. A bad experience will be shared!