26 Degrees in the Shade . . .

How To Relate To Customers in Your Bar or Restaurant

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Public Relations : An Overview on Conversing With Customers and Avoiding Arguments

This is a big subject, which has taken Ines and I 20 years to learn and we are both still learning, so all I can do in this short post is cover the main points. I will come back frequently in additional posts to give more detailed advice on how to maintain good PR in your Spanish bar.

There are three types of PR system commonly adopted in bars and restaurants:

1. The impersonal approach used by big restaurants, which is inappropriate for a small or medium sized English bar or restaurant in Spain, so we can forget about this one.
2. The full-on gossipy (Annie Walker) approach. This will lead you into endless conflicts and arguments and cause people to boycott your bar, so I would advise strongly against this approach.
3. Finally our system, of trying to be friendly with everyone, treating everybody equally and never talking about any one behind his or her back.

The Friendly system may sound easy, but believe me it isn’t and no matter how well you get on with people in normal life, you will probably have to learn to be more discreet when handling people in a bar situation.

Learn to be friendly, whilst keeping the details you release about your private life both very vague and to an absolute minimum.

Become a Good Listener

Now that I have outlined three systems and recommended the one that has work well for us over many years; I’ll mention some books you can read to help you with your PR and in a subsequent post I will try to shine a light on :

• Why people spend a lot of time in bars, and
• the basic types (categories) of people who will be visiting your bar.

Vital Reading

Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People.

This book was first published in 1953 and is still one of the best books to help you learn about how to relate to other people and get them to like you. Of course if you prefer you can Google for other titles that will help you.

Don’t forget; if a customer doesn’t like you he or she won’t spend their money on a regular basis in your bar restaurant.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008 at 3:40 pm and is filed under Business. Find similar posts by selecting and of the following tags: customer relations, PR. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.