Cafe Etienne

[nikinik]

I've had really good luck with sharing suggestions and complaints with restaurant owners.

If I had a really bad server and I complained about them...I'd expect it to be handled in a way that I felt that the owner or manager truly cared about how I felt and cared about my experience.

I can't say that I'd expect them to fire the person. There's no way for me to know the entire situation.

But I do know that I just wouldn't allow myself to be waited on by that person again.

Said person would've had to do something absolutely horrible for me to never go back to one of my favorite places unless that person were fired.

[jason white]

Too answer some of the questions, I think alot of owners listen to what their customers want. But one thing to keep in mind is that the owners most important customers are his employees. With that being said every employee is going to make mistakes we all do. But I am speaking for myself here when I say this, I want to know if my customers had an unpleasant experience for any reason. That includeds the food,the service, the atmosphere, anything at all. The way I handle all complaints is to investigate exactly what the problem is and what happened on City Diners side of it to make you have an unpleasant time. If it is employee related I try and coach that employee through what happened to get better. It doesn't always work, but in most cases it does.

To try and inform you about bringing in new faces from using restaurant.com, it does accomplish that for about the first two to three months. After that I can tell you that out of the thirty certificates we honor per month about 90% of them are exsisting customers. The last four months in a row all thirty of our certificates are sold out with in two days of being avalible. I can tell you right now for next month within a few names exactly who will buy them. That is where the surveys come in. Owners in alot of cases use mystery shoppers and pay good money to do so. If they can accomplish the same thing through the surveys through restaurant.com then they don't mind using it.


Jason White
Owner/President
City Diner

[nikinik]

Very interesting indeed. I am guilty as charged of using them more than once for the same establishment. I guess my thinking was that a restaurant would rather you use them than not come in....especially with the slower summer months.

I'm wondering if it would be better to only allow each user to use one maybe twice so that you can get new customers only. But then again, people would probably just sign up using other profiles.

It's a tough one. I guess a restaurant would just have to figure out when they get to that point where they're seeing that the promo is no longer brining in new faces...just old ones.

Have you considered doing coupons in The Clipper magazine? A friend of mine manages a restaurant and he says every time they put a coupon in there, the place is packed. And he said the $5 he gives off...or the other offers he puts in there are nothing compared to what he's making off of it.

[Isabella Maja]

I've had really good luck with sharing suggestions and complaints with restaurant owners.

If I had a really bad server and I complained about them...I'd expect it to be handled in a way that I felt that the owner or manager truly cared about how I felt and cared about my experience.

I can't say that I'd expect them to fire the person. There's no way for me to know the entire situation.

But I do know that I just wouldn't allow myself to be waited on by that person again.

Said person would've had to do something absolutely horrible for me to never go back to one of my favorite places unless that person were fired.

There are 10 of us that feel exactly the same way about this waiter.
Other than just being a jerk, the vibes he puts off are deathly.
I've told the owner how we all feel. I even got a friend of mine a job there as a waitress, just so we could go there (well, and she needed a job).
She ended up leaving shortly after . . . said the waiter in question always complained about getting stiffed while she was making fab tips.

I'm just one of those people that can't eat if there is upset.
This waiter basically made the meal miserable for all of us.
Many, many times. We finally gave up. The owner knows the whole story.

Jason, I used to do alot of mystery shopping. I loved doing it. It was waaaayyy more interesting than using a coupon!

[Dilfan]

Jason, et al,
I'm a little late getting in on this, but there is at least one other possibility for the certificate user not filling in the survey. I purchase a lot of the certificates and give them to friends and business associates. When the certificate is used, I get the email asking for the survey and if I don't get feedback from the user, then I can't honestly fill out the survey.
When I personally use a certificate, I do try to fill out the survey as honestly as I can, but I can assure you that I do not recieve a survey for each certificate that I use.

[JRO]

I have used 6-10 certificates & only got 1 e-mail asking for the survey. And I did take the time to fill it out