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Learn to Touch a Table To Better Communicate With Customers
A tradition among restaurant owners is what all businesses need to be better business owners.
Rachael Dempsey of Posit (The data science company, home of the R-Studio IDE) gave a terrific presentation and blogpost on her experiences at her family restaurant. One concept she learned is an industry practice restaurant managers do called “Touch a Table”. What happens is during operating hours a manager will walk around to each patron’s table and ask “How you’re enjoying your meal?”, “How are you enjoying your evening?”, or some similar question. The manager goes to each and every table asking the same kind of questions.
Thus he/she/they are “Touching a Table”. The purpose of this is to connect with the customer and understand what’s going on with that customer’s experience at that time.
To build customer trust, marketers must bring this “touch a table” concept into online communication. People are constantly bombarded with messages stating that they need to be online to connect and join a room to follow. Thanks to social media and its existence over the last 15 years, people have seen or heard that “follow me” message, bombarded daily in many instances.
But many people experience no follow-up message telling them what’s next after they have followed. That fact, combined with the global shift in communication that social media has introduced, means that many people are left without any further experience with a business to appreciate. It is a missed moment for businesses to connect with their customers further.
Small business owners should learn how to apply the touch-a-table concept to their mix of online and offline commerce. The effort will teach entrepreneurs and their teams what people would like to see, alert them to the next steps that should be made available, and stir up engagement where possible.
This means monitoring where you met a customer and recognizing the dates you last communicated. This can be as simple as checklist reminders. Those two factors should trigger a full feel for what that customer was asking for and if they’re being serviced correctly. How this gets executed may vary within your business structure through teams using different communication means. But it is vital to be added to an experience online.
Having a touch a table mentality will foster better communication with customers and strengthen your brand way much more so than any piece of Chat-GPT-generated content could ever do.
