Did you know that as a food truck owner, unhappy food truck customers are one of the best learning tools for your mobile food business? While every vendor wants to make all of their customers happy, realistically that will never happen. With that said, your unhappy customers have a lot to teach you, so be sure to pay attention to what they have to say in order to improve your food truck business.

  • Connecting. Before you can learn from your unhappy food truck customers, you need to make sure you’re connecting with all your customers. Social media has made it easy to ensure that your customers can reach you with their concerns.
  • Learning. Once you start connecting with your customers, pay particular attention to your unhappy food truck customers. They generally have the most to teach you. Here are three of the primary things you can learn from customers that are unhappy with your menu items or service, for whatever reason.

3 Things You Can Learn From Unhappy Food Truck Customers

What’s important to your customers

It’s important to listen to the language your customers are using and to keep track of what customers are complaining about. Are they unhappy about wait times and costs?

Listening to the complaints of your customers will help you figure out what they find important. It could be excellent food, lots of choices, ability to customization orders, or fantastic customer service. Letting unhappy customers tell you what’s most important to them will tell you where you’ll get the best return on your investment by making improvements to your menu or services.

How to improve customer service

Often times, unhappy food truck customers are unhappy with some aspect of your customer service. Again, listen to your customers to see what their complaints center around.

If, for instance, you get many complaints that customers have to wait in line too long, then you may want to consider increasing the number of line cooks so you can churn out the orders constantly. Or you may choose to par cook some of your longer wait items so your current staff can get them out the window faster.

RELATED: Customer Service: Show Customers Your Food Truck Cares

How to improve your menu items

Of course, some customers may also be unhappy with your menu items. They may simply not have gotten what they were expecting, and you certainly can’t satisfy everyone. But satisfying the greatest number of customers with your menu should certainly be the goal.

Yet again, it’s important to follow the trends when it comes to customer complaints. Do many customers complain about the same item on your menu being too spicy? Consider re-engineering your recipe even if it was your grandmother’s.

The Bottom Line

Any time a customer is unhappy with your menu, whether they’re connecting with you through your website or through your Facebook page, get as much specific detail on what they dislike about the specific item as possible. The more detail you can get, the more information you’ll have that will help you improve your menu moving forward.

Have learned other things from unhappy food truck customers? We’d love to hear what they are. Share your thoughts on this topic in the comment section, our food truck forum or social media. Facebook | Twitter