Stop Ignoring Your Customers

You have customers and potential customers, who are upset with your food truck as I write this. I can almost guarantee that there are far more of them than you realize and because of that you are obliviously losing out on some of their business. The only way to capture those lost customers is to realize that you’re making the mistake of ignoring your customers and change your behavior.

This is one of the easiest ways for a food truck to make a mistake on social media, because we typically don’t think of silence as ignoring your customers or as an insult. But in a few circumstances, it’s a huge let down.

3 areas to stop ignoring your customers:

Customer engagement is one of the most important things a food truck business can do for its customers. Here are the mistakes vendors make by ignoring your customers.

Ignoring Complaints. This is the obvious one. When a customer complains, they expect a response. So do your other customers. The way you respond says a lot to your audience about how they can expect to be treated.
Ignoring Compliments. This one’s less obvious and possibly a bigger problem. A customer who pours their heart into a positive comment is likely to feel cheated if you never respond. Obviously, you can’t please everybody, but it’s good to at least be aware that this happens.
Ignoring Questions. When you leave a customer hanging, it can look bad, especially when it happens out in the open where other consumers can see it.

The Bottom Line

It’s impossible to please everybody, but you will save your food truck a great deal of alienation if you invest as much as you can in customer interaction. Most of them don’t understand just how busy a food truck owners is but a large minority of them will take your lack of response personally.

Have you been ignoring your customers? Have you made corrections to this? We’d love to hear from you. Share your thoughts in the comment section, our food truck forum or on social media and we promise we won’t ignore you. Facebook | Twitter

About the Author: Richard Myrick

Richard Myrick is an architect by degree (Lawrence Technological University, Southfield, Michigan) who began his career in real estate development and architectural planning. In September of 2010 he created Mobile Cuisine Magazine to fill an information void he found when he began researching how to start a mobile hotdog cart in Chicago. Richard found that there was no central repository of mobile street food information anywhere on the internet, and with that, the idea for MCM was born. Richard also wrote the "Running a Food Truck for Dummies" available in bookstores everywhere and Amazon. You can reach out to Richard by email at: [email protected].