When you are trying to build a business, there will be a number of factors that you’d need to focus on. Chief among these factors would be ensuring that the needs of your customers are met without fail. This is especially pertinent for those that are starting restaurant businesses, since no self respecting customer would want to stick around in a business that doesn’t have the capacity to provide them with a good experience.
Given the multiplicity of moving parts that you’d need to juggle, it’s fairly likely that you’d forget about the all importance aspect of customer comfort. No matter how great your food is and irrespective of how much diversity you incorporate into your menu, the fact remains that you’d have a hard time holding on to customers if you don’t keep their comfort in mind.
Customer comfort can be optimized through a variety of methods, but ensuring that your chairs are top notch usually takes the cake. An uncomfortable seating arrangement can wreak havoc with your restaurants future prospects, leading to a wide range of negative outcomes that can be hard to recover from.
Firstly, chairs that lack the right amount of comfort can result in your customers refusing to stay for long periods of time. Ideally speaking, you would want you customers to spend as much time as possible within your eatery. It stands to reason that longer stays will lead to larger orders being placed which can be great for your cash flow.
It’s also important to mention how much discomfort can ruin the customer experience. Chairs that lack the right qualities will diminish satisfaction rates, and perhaps the worst outcome of this would be a bad review.
Nothing will tarnish your restaurant’s reputation like a single bad review. Even if you have far more good reviews than bad ones, most prospective customers who are considering giving your eatery a try would be discouraged by the presence of a negative experience that a previous customer publicized.
So, now that we have contextualized the importance of buying comfortable restaurant chairs, it’s time to move on to the next step. How do you determine whether or not the chairs you bought fit the bill?
It can seem obvious at the outset, but you’d be surprised at how unpredictable such things can be. A good chair needs to provide adequate back support, otherwise your customers would feel aches and pains that would compel them to leave well before they get the chance to fully enjoy their meals.
This is why ergonomic chairs should always be a priority for you as a restaurateur. That doesn’t necessarily mean splurging on high end office chairs that would eat into your profit margins. Rather, you need to find a balance between affordability and comfort, and there are several types of chairs that would be ideal based on all those requirements.
The question you need to be asking right now is if your chairs have what it takes to keep a customer’s posture upright. Chances are that your desire for low set up costs would force you to go for the cheaper options, and lumbar support is just one of the many things that affordable chairs would fail to provide.
Don’t take this to mean that your only options will be expensive, though. Like we have already stated, it’s all about finding a middle ground. If you’ve already bought a set of budget chairs, you can invest in adding some padding or cushioning to them in the right areas.
Try to emphasize cushioning in the arm rests and the back, since everything else is secondary to these locations. Most customers rest their elbows on the arm rests while they eat, and cushioning allows them to forget any discomfort that may have otherwise occurred.
As for back cushioning, it’s easy to see why it’s so recommended. Uncomfortable chairs that lack support for the spine can be transformed with some strategically placed cushioning. All it takes is a bit of foam wrapped in decent quality fabric and you will have chairs that can measure up to the cream of the crop!
It also bears mentioning that comfort needs aren’t always the same for different customers. If you’re operating a high end establishment, your customers would understandable have greater comfort needs due to the pricey menu items that they are willing to pay for.
That said, eateries that operate on economies of scale such as fast food restaurants can afford to sacrifice a bit of comfort. After all, customers are only expecting a quick and affordable meal at such locations, which gives you a bit of wiggle room to offer slightly lower comfort levels in exchange.
Whether you go for wooden chairs, metal chairs or plastic, there will always be options that you can avail to bring comfort to the next level. Ambiance related factors such as music and lighting will have a role to play as well, but customers simply won’t be able to pay attention to all of these finer details if they’re constantly adjusting their seating position.
When all else fails, there’s nothing wrong with conducting a quick survey of your clientele. Customers are usually quick to mention any complaints that they might have, so if you ask them if they were satisfied by the chairs, you’ll get valuable data instantly. Just make sure that you put this data to good use, otherwise your survey will be an exercise in futility.
To summarize, you can deem your restaurant chairs perfectly comfortable so long as they are ergonomically designed or if they have padding in all of the right places. Profit margins can soar once this basic requirement is squared away!