Customer Experience Mapping: Identifying Potential Chargeback Triggers in Your Restaurant

As a restaurant owner, your job is to deliver a great customer experience from start to finish. It's not all about your food. While great dishes play a big part in the experience, customers pay attention to every interaction with your business. From customer service to the cleanliness of your dining room, it all matters!

When you don't meet a customer's needs and expectations, you might end up dealing with chargebacks and the many costs associated with them. There are countless ways to reduce your chargeback rate and avoid payment disputes, but one of the best approaches is to be proactive about preventing them.

Customer journey mapping is the unique process of learning about your customers' experiences when interacting with your business. It's a way to visualize every touchpoint and gain insight into potential friction. Businesses in numerous industries use maps to learn about the customer journey, using what they know to increase revenue and move more people through the sales funnel.

But for a restaurant, customer journey mapping is a fantastic way of identifying possible chargeback triggers, empowering them to prevent issues before they occur.

How Do Chargebacks Impact Business?

Chargebacks are no joke in the restaurant industry. Globally, there were over 238 million chargebacks in 2023, costing businesses over $117 billion!

A chargeback occurs when a customer disputes a transaction with their bank or credit card issuer. There are many reasons why customers can dispute payments made with their debit or credit cards. Some are legitimate fraud concerns, but federal law allows customers to use the chargeback process to get refunds for nearly anything.

They're an unfortunate reality in the restaurant industry, where customers can dispute transactions due to issues like inferior food quality or lousy service. When financial institutions initiate a chargeback, the money paid in the original amount gets refunded. But that's not all. Financial institutions also charge fees.

All in, restaurants may pay over $3.00 for every dollar of the original transaction amount!

They're a huge source of revenue loss for restaurants. While you can fight claims with financial institutions, the process is still costly. Plus, it won't prevent the possible reputational hit merchants must face.

Preventing chargebacks is the best way to safeguard your business. However, because customers can make claims and disputes for various reasons, you must proactively identify potential chargeback triggers and give your customers fewer reasons to initiate the process. Otherwise, it's a game of cat and mouse that you won't win.

Basics of Customer Journey Mapping

Customer journey mapping is a complex process, but it can help you prevent chargebacks and identify room for improvement. There's a reason why this technique is so popular for businesses of all sizes. It's about enhancing the customer experience to improve satisfaction and boost the bottom line.

There's no exact formula for producing your map. However, best practices suggest that you begin by creating customer personas.

All customers are different, but you can categorize them into groups based on demographics, needs and expectations. Starting there lets you gain insight into people's different experiences with your restaurant and brand. What a Gen Z diner goes through may be different from someone older!

Personas help you map things more strategically, allowing you to develop effective chargeback prevention strategies.

After creating personas, you can identify your objectives for this map. Customer journey mapping is versatile and can help improve every facet of your business. For example, some enterprises use mapping to learn more about every step of the sales funnel. Others will focus on customer service and support.

In this case, your goal is to prevent chargebacks! Therefore, your maps should focus on identifying moments that encourage customers to dispute a debit and credit card payment.

Visuals are paramount when creating a customer experience map. You want to map the customer journey from start to finish. Raw data and written text can make it difficult to absorb information and visualize where specific events occur.

Identifying Key Touchpoints

Customer experience maps are a powerful tool for learning about every touchpoint in a guest's journey. A touchpoint refers to interactions with your restaurant and brand.

Of course, there are the usual interactions you know to expect. For example, in-store interactions with your staff are an obvious touchpoint. But it goes beyond that, and many customers will interact with your brand in some way before they even place an order.

For example, maybe they do a quick online search of your restaurant to see your menu. That's a touchpoint. Then, they might read online reviews on social media. That's also a touchpoint! After ordering delivery on a third-party app, they have many more touchpoints.

One benefit of customer journey mapping is that you can see it all. Put yourself in your customers' shoes and consider every possible interaction and exposure to your restaurant. It all matters, and mapping every touchpoint will highlight where things can go wrong and what opportunities you have to shine.

Recognizing Areas Where Chargebacks May Arise

Once you have touchpoints mapped out, you can spot areas where chargebacks could arise. Think creatively and empathize with the customer experience. Consider how guests order from your business and why they might request a chargeback. You'll be surprised at how many areas create a negative customer experience.

For instance, say that a customer reads incorrect information about your menu options on a third-party delivery app. They use that to place an order, but because the data is not correct, they don't receive what they thought they would. As a result, they request a chargeback.

You may also have other areas that need addressing. Poor communication between the app they order through and your restaurant can lead to accuracy problems. Or, they might dispute a payment because the food took too long to prepare.

Whatever, identify every possible pain point. Use chargeback data and reason codes to fill your map with information and learn more about what triggers payment disputes.

Analyzing Customer Interactions During the Dining Experience

There's no better source of information for journey mapping than your customers. Analyze interactions. Be a fly on the wall to study what happens. Whether in-person or digital, observing interactions throughout the dining experience will unveil tons of information you can use to prevent chargebacks.

For instance, you might notice friction between ordering and delivering processes. In your restaurant, you may observe worrying behavior from your staff that creates a negative customer experience.

If you want even more insight, consider reaching out to customers directly. You can use feedback for improvements, ask customers for their honest opinions and conduct focus groups. The more you learn from your customers, the better.

Implementing Preventive Measures

With customer journey mapping, you can clearly view the entire customer experience from start to finish. You'll learn about various touchpoints, identify areas that need improvement and spot opportunities to change how your restaurant does things.

The best thing you can do is adopt preventative measures to prevent chargebacks. There are many ways to do this, but the key is taking extra precautions to ensure a smoother experience. For example, you can create protocols for clarification from nontraditional orders or unclear instructions. Another idea is to establish better communication channels between your kitchen staff, waitstaff and customers.

Aim to have preventative measures to address all worst-case scenarios. Your goal is to prevent chargeback triggers before they impact your customers. Extra measures will allow you to be more vigilant about delivering a stellar, friction-free customer experience.

Leveraging Technology for Monitoring

There's no shortage of great technology available to restaurants like yours. You're missing out on major improvement if you're not taking advantage of it.

Software like Superorder can help you monitor orders, providing alerts to potential errors in real time. Artificial intelligence enhances software capabilities in ways that most never thought possible. It's like having an extra set of super-accurate eyes.

The right platform will improve order accuracy and alert you to potential issues before they affect your customers. Imagine how proactive you could be if you had software monitoring to alert you to possible delays and errors. Instead of allowing those mishaps to continue, you can fix them, communicate with your customers and prevent a chargeback.

Educating Customers on Policies

Another way to prevent chargebacks using customer experience mapping is through education. When you map touchpoints, you can identify areas that lack the clarity customers need to order food confidently.

Your menu may lack information about ingredient substitutions or order modifications. Or, it could be too confusing about side dish options or delivery timelines.

Whatever the case, education is key. Consider revamping your menu and making it as clear as possible. You can also include more information on your app or within advertisements to clear up any confusion that might lead to crushed expectations and a lousy customer experience.

Continuous Improvement Strategies

Preventing chargebacks is not a one-off affair. Journey mapping will unveil considerable information about the customer experience, helping you identify possible chargeback triggers and empowering you to address them. However, the restaurant industry and guest needs are evolving.

The key to continued success is to establish a feedback loop. Always accept feedback and use what you learn to update your map and make improvements. Keep that cycle going to continuously evolve with your customer base.

There's always something you can change, and you can't rest on your laurels. Develop strategies for constant improvement and make your quest for positive change never-ending.

Get Started With Superorder Today

Dealing with chargebacks is one of the more frustrating aspects of running a restaurant. However, there are tons you can do to make them a thing of the past. With customer experience mapping, you'll have all the insight to understand why payment disputes occur.

Learn what your customers go through, discover opportunities for improvement and change the experience for maximum customer satisfaction.

Superorder is here to help throughout the entire process. Superorder is an all-in-one restaurant management platform built for growth and long-term success. With Superorder, you can take advantage of powerful feedback and dispute management tools to prevent chargebacks. Powerful technology like real-time monitoring will keep you in the loop while helping your team address issues before they become a chargeback.

Check out Superorder today to elevate your restaurant's approach to chargeback prevention while improving efficiency and productivity.