A food complaint response letter is a formal letter, that is written by the hotel, cafe, or restaurant management, and is addressed to the dissatisfied customer, who had previously launched a complaint against the food of that restaurant. This letter is written in response to that complaint, and an explanation, with an apology, is provided by the restaurant, to please the unhappy customer. In addition, some sort of offer is given to compensate for the customer’s bad experience.
Sometimes, an angry customer may write a food complaint letter to the food authority of the state as well. In this case, the response letter would either be written by the authority itself, or it would ask the concerned restaurant to respond back.
When a customer has a complaint against the food of any restaurant, it can impact the restaurant’s clientage to a great extent, especially in today’s world of social media and review-based business.
Therefore, in such an environment, it is a clever business decision to deal with the customer complaints and satisfy them in a way they want. If it is the restaurant’s mistake, it should attempt to rectify it, by accepting, apologizing, and compensating for it. However, even if the restaurant is not at fault, the complaint should be dealt with tactically, so as to eliminate the possibility of negative reviews and unfavorable word-of-mouth publicity.
One of the ways is to write the customer a response letter after his complaint and explain the situation. The food complaint response letter is written in such scenarios. The information included in it can vary as per the launched complaint, party at fault, restaurant policies, damage repair offers, etc. However, generally, the following details are included in such letters:
- Date.
- Customer details.
- Restaurant/hotel details.
- Reference to the launched complaint.
- Response to that complaint.
- Explanation of the issue.
- Apology.
- Show value of the customers for the restaurant.
- Compensation or offers, if any.
This letter embarks a good impression of the restaurant on the customer, and may even reduce the damage, that has been done when the customer had an unsatisfactory experience. The customer would feel important and valued and would consider giving the restaurant another chance.
Sample Food Complaint Response Letter
Dear Mr. Jackson,
I am writing this letter in response to your complaint regarding the quality of food at our ABC restaurant on 4th August, 20XX.
As per your complaint, the food that was served to you when you came to our restaurant on 4th August, 20XX, for dinner, was not of good taste and quality. It was your first experience at our restaurant, and you were highly dissatisfied. After your complaint, when we checked, we found that you were right, and the meat was indeed stale. However, we do not have a clue how such a big mistake is possible in the high level of quality governance, that we maintain at our restaurant.
We highly appreciate your feedback, and we highly apologize for your bad experience. We try to serve our customers in the best manner possible, and we try to own our mistakes as well. We have fired our quality control manager, as for us, our customer is always the priority. Furthermore, we would like to offer a free dinner for you with your family, so that we can serve you, and amend our mistake.
Please accept our apology, and give us another chance to serve you better. We would await your response.
Thank you and we are extremely sorry again.
Regards,
Samantha Wilson.
