The importance of understanding your diners

You've heard of the saying 'the customer is always right'. In the world of hospitality, particularly at the front line of service, this is paramount in ensuring your customers receive a great experience. Everyone knows that people will shout about bad experiences far quicker than they'll dish out praise, and in our world of social media, negative feedback travels so much further - and faster!

Ensuring that real and constant client satisfaction is achieved, however, is more about just accepting that the customer is always right. It's about really understanding your customer and being able to adapt to their requirements.

With the Marlin App, for example, we knew from past experience that employers were struggling to find the best talent and unwilling to pay a small fortune in agency fees to possibly achieve that. Likewise, we knew that experienced hospitality job seekers were finding it difficult to find work in this competitive market and frustrated by the time taking them in perfecting CVs, applying to job boards and chasing recruitment agents for updates.

For us, we've found success in the community we've managed to build and continue to grow and knowing that by allowing our users to talk freely and easily with each other in such a unique yet simple way, it's changed everything - for the better. We're establishing ourselves as game-changers, but that's not because we've necessarily done anything that's technologically ground-breaking, we've just been the very first to identify a broken model and found a simple yet effective way to fix it.

But it's not enough to just create a platform and then sit back and relax! The real key to ensuring our community is REALLY satisfied is making sure we listen to what they want. Our platform is an evolving one, and will never stop adapting to the changing needs of our clientele – that's both the job seekers and the employers who use our app. We regularly ask our users for their feedback and their suggestions on what we can do to improve the app, and we make sure that every proposal is carefully considered.

Our users love being listened to in this way (who wouldn't!), and it's an easy way of making sure we keep our customers satisfied – delivering something that they want, something that will benefit them, and in turn that keeps our business model really successful and on top of the game.

So, my advice is this: it's not about 'nodding and smiling' to your customer, it's about understanding them, listening to them, and delivering something that really means something to them. Why wouldn't they keep coming back?! And what's more, they'll tell everyone else. Perfect!

Happy customers, happy business!