Capturing Your Invisible Guests

A busy Saturday night is usually something to celebrate. Tables are full, the kitchen is busy and hundreds of customers may pass through the restaurant over the course of an evening.

By Monday morning, the reservation system provides a reassuring record of what happened. Names, email addresses, cell numbers, booking times, party sizes and perhaps notes about individual reservations are all sitting there. It looks like a valuable customer database.

But is it?

Take a perfectly ordinary table of four. One person made the reservation, which means the restaurant probably knows who they are. But what about the other three people sitting at the table?

They ate the same food, received the same service and experienced the same restaurant. One of them may even have been the person who suggested going there in the first place. Yet unless those diners have visited before, made a reservation themselves or identified themselves in some other way, the restaurant may know absolutely nothing about them.

The reservation system hasn't failed. It has done precisely what it was designed to do. The problem comes when we expect a reservation system to tell us something it was never designed to tell us: who all our customers are.

A Full Reservation Book Can Hide a Customer Gap

Restaurants are understandably interested in covers. If 300 people dine on Saturday evening, 300 customers have experienced the business. They have tasted the food, encountered the staff, formed an opinion about the restaurant and decided whether they would consider coming back.

The aim isn't to turn every cover into a row on a spreadsheet. It is to reduce the number of satisfied customers who leave completely anonymously when some of them would have been perfectly happy to continue the relationship.

But 300 covers don't necessarily produce 300 identifiable customers. Reservations frequently represent couples, families, groups of friends or colleagues, so the number of individual customers served can be considerably higher than the number of people recorded as having made those reservations.

That distinction is easy to overlook because the numbers in a reservation system can be impressive. A restaurant may have accumulated thousands of names over several years and quite reasonably regard that information as its customer database. The more revealing question is whether those names genuinely represent the customers walking through the door.

In conversations I've had with businesses about customer communication, I've found that asking how many customers they have usually produces a confident answer. The number often comes from a booking or reservation system. Ask how many of the people they actually served last weekend they could contact again, however, and the conversation can become rather different.

That isn't a criticism of the restaurant or its technology. It simply exposes the difference between recording a reservation and recognising a customer.

A Different Question About Your Customer Database

Most restaurants know how many covers they served last week. They know how many reservations were made, how many were no-shows and probably which evenings were busiest. There is another number, though, that I think deserves considerably more attention:

What proportion of the customers we serve could we actually contact again?

I'm not talking about how many contacts are sitting in a database or how many people follow the restaurant on social media. I mean the people who recently sat at a table, enjoyed a meal and walked back out through the door. How many of those actual customers have chosen to establish a relationship that allows the restaurant to communicate with them again?

The person who made the reservation isn't necessarily the restaurant's most valuable future customer. One of the other diners may live around the corner, be planning a celebration or simply have enjoyed the restaurant enough to become a regular. The difficult job of getting them through the door has already been done; the opportunity is being able to continue the relationship afterwards.

Why the Gap Matters Most When Tables Are Empty

The difference between a reservation database and a customer database becomes much more noticeable when business is quiet. Imagine looking at tomorrow evening's reservations and seeing several tables still available. The natural response is to look for more customers, perhaps by posting on social media, increasing an advertising budget, promoting an offer or simply hoping that a few last-minute reservations arrive.

There is nothing wrong with any of those approaches, and restaurants will always need to attract new customers. But somewhere nearby there may also be people who have already eaten at the restaurant, enjoyed themselves and would happily return. Reaching those people is a very different marketing proposition from advertising to somebody who has never heard of the restaurant.

A previous customer doesn't need to discover that the restaurant exists or be shown photographs of the dining room to understand what to expect. They already know the location, the atmosphere, the service and what appears on the plate. The restaurant isn't trying to persuade a stranger to take a chance; it is giving somebody who already knows the business a reason to come back.

This is why I would question the value of measuring marketing success simply by the size of the audience reached. Ten thousand people seeing an ad for an empty table tomorrow night may sound impressive, but a much smaller number of previous customers who enjoyed their last visit and have chosen to hear from the restaurant again may be considerably more useful.

Customer Identification Shouldn't Get in the Way of Hospitality

There is an obvious danger in taking this argument too far. Nobody wants to arrive for dinner and feel as though they are completing an application form, and restaurants exist to provide hospitality rather than interrogate everybody who sits down. Nor does a restaurant need to know everything about every person who visits.

There is, however, a considerable difference between collecting information simply because technology makes it possible and giving a customer a genuine reason to identify themselves. Someone may choose to hear about a future event, a menu change, a special evening or late availability. A regular visitor may simply want an easy way to stay connected with a restaurant they enjoy.

How that opportunity is presented matters. Participation should be voluntary, customers should understand what they are signing up for, and the process should be simple enough not to interfere with the experience itself. If collecting somebody's details becomes an irritation, the restaurant has rather defeated the object.

The aim isn't to turn every cover into a row on a spreadsheet. It is to reduce the number of satisfied customers who leave completely anonymously when some of them would have been perfectly happy to continue the relationship.

Reservation technology has transformed the way restaurants manage tables, but its fundamental purpose hasn't changed. It tells you who made the reservation; it was never designed to identify everybody who shared the experience.

Some of those other customers will never return, while others may become regulars or simply need the right reason to visit again. Restaurants understandably invest time and money trying to reach people who haven't visited yet, but there is an opportunity much closer to home among those who already have.

Perhaps the most revealing measure of a restaurant database isn't how many names it contains. It's how many of the customers who walk through the door the restaurant actually knows well enough to contact again.