How to Make Customers come back to your Restaurant
Restaurants always constantly try to go after new clients to increase their sales. While that is important, it’s even more important to find ways to make existing customers repeat their purchases. If analyzed accurately, restaurants will find out that most of their sales come from existing customers. Not just that, studies showed that acquiring a new customer costs up to 7 times more than retaining an existing one. Also, the probability of selling to an existing customer is up to 14 times higher than the probability of selling a new customer.
So before thinking about acquiring new customers, you must have a well implemented retention plan so your business does not become a leaking boat. Here is a few tips to do so.
Listen to your Employees
When it comes to customers’ retention planning, you may ignore your employees thinking they don’t have any effect. However, in reality, they know your customers more than you do because they interact with them daily. Many times, they are the reason why customers come back again and again. Therefore, your employees have to be the first pillar to listen to and train when developing methods to make customers come back.
Provide 5-Star Service
It might be true that people forget what they heard, but never forget how they felt. In highly competitive space like restaurants, this must be on your top list of tasks. Personalizing the experience can be the key to fully own the customer even if you don’t have the most delicious food. For example, if you welcome the customer when he walks in with his name and ask him if he is going to go with his preferred meal and take him to the table he prefers, that’s a ming blowing experience. Your restaurant will always be on top of the list whenever he feels like eating out.
React to Online Complaints
If you’re using Taker, they you can listen to customers online as they can send complaints through the app. If you receive any, try taking it further offline and contact the customer to better understand what his issue is. There are two benefits, first is to really understand why your customer wasn’t happy so you can fix it to make sure it does not happen again to other customers. Second, contacting him will make him feel taken care of and that makes him loyal and loyal customers always bring new customers. Word of mouth travels like a rocket and it can be one of the biggest success of failure reason.
Compensate your Customers
Think about it, your customer left all options and specifically came to your restaurant to eat. If he encounters any issue with service, food or cleanliness, he won’t come back again. Therefore, you have to have a compensation plan specifying the possible issues that might be encountered and their compensations. This plan has to be shared among your employees so they can act quickly when needed without going back and forth. The best form of compensation is future ones because this makes him come back again. It can be a free meal, discount, or a credit in his wallet.
To do that, you have to have a system in place to keep track of all of these compensations as you’ll really look very bad if you forget. So using a spreadsheet can be sufficient, or if you want to be more advanced and professional you can use Taker to offer promocodes that your customers can use at anytime through the app or website.
Implement a Loyalty Program
Imagine you gained some points and you need to make one or two purchases to get a free meal, wouldn’t try to make it?. Of course you would, and this means you’re going to leave all other options you have out there to specifically go to or order from that particular restaurant. That’s really a very good way to make customers come back which notably increases your sales. Having the points prominent and always visible and accessible to customers is key so they will keep trying to increase their points and always watch progress.
Turning one-time visitor into a repeat customer needs to be engineered. It’s multiple factors and tactics that you blend together to have a long-lasting wide effect with your customers that can be the primary reason for your restaurant’s success.
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