With the constant influx of competitors and the ever-changing and complex hospitality market, it can be hard to find new and invigorating ways to earn customer loyalty and maximize your revenue.
But with the emergence of new technologies and consumer-centric strategies, there are more and more things your brand can leverage in order to stay ahead of the game.
With that, we’ve discovered the top 4 ways to enhance the customer experience that you can implement today to maximize revenue during these competitive times:
Define goals and communicate
Defining achievable goals for your restaurant and building an effective strategy to attain them is key. Having a vision for your business and creating a roadmap to get there can help your business take the right steps to enhance your customer’s experience.
However, in order to create goals, it’s important to first measure your team’s and restaurant’s performance. Having a better understanding of your business’s current state, and where improvements are needed, is critical to designing a proper execution plan.
Communication is also vital. Once you’ve created achievable goals, it’s important that you hold regular meetings with your team to discuss progress as well as congratulate those who go above and beyond to provide impeccable service. Taking the time to set goals and communicate with your team members will encourage them to consistently enhance the customer experience, making for happier customers, better reviews, and maximized revenue.
With Loop Pulse™, managers can have that overarching view of team member performance, as well as customer sentiment. Once customers are finished with their meal at your restaurant, they can utilize Loop®’s self-serve kiosk or access Loop on their mobile device to rate multiple aspects of the experience. By asking customer questions that you’ve pre-programmed, managers gain a holistic view of the restaurant and team performance. Details on individual performance can then be shared with specific team members to reveal what steps they need to take to improve and provide the best customer experience possible.
Listen to customers
According to a Gartner study, the most frequently cited projects that companies are focusing on to enhance customer experience are associated with collecting and analyzing customer feedback and communicating actions to team members and customers, followed by reconfiguring customer process.
Providing exceptional customer experiences begins with listening to customers who voice their opinions and concerns. Whether the comments are positive or negative, listening to customers can help you understand who is coming into your restaurant, what they expect, and how you can deliver a better and more tailored experience.
In the restaurant industry, traffic and brand recognition directly correlate to the customer experience. Understanding how fast service is if your food is up to customer standards, and what the atmosphere of the restaurant is like, are all important things to have solid customer feedback on. Knowing the answers to these questions, from the customers themselves, can help you build a restaurant strategy that puts customer experience at the forefront.
With Loop Pulse™, you can gain real-time insight into the customer experience, meaning customers’ issues can be heard and resolved promptly. This can further ensure they leave the premises feeling more positive, satisfied, and willing to return. On the rare occasion, if a customer is upset about their service and rates the establishment terribly using Loop®’s onsite kiosk, team members and managers can see the response in real-time. This gives them an opportunity to recover the customer before they leave and resolve the bad experience with a face-to-face conversation.
Stay in touch via messaging
Messaging has become a popular tactic for restaurants, mostly due to millennial demand, and is essential to staying connected with customers in the fast-paced hospitality industry. By adopting messaging, your restaurant can garner more feedback, inform customers of current promotions, remind them of reservations, and ultimately build more personal relationships.
With the Loop® platform, you can foster stronger communication between your customers and team members on multiple messaging channels, all from one unified inbox. This means whoever manages your customer conversations can answer Facebook Messages, Twitter Direct Messages, text message and so much more from one unified inbox – offering a more simplified process for team members and a faster response rate for customers.
In addition, you can leverage the messaging component to offer your customers a survey to fill out after their experience at your restaurant. This provides real-time feedback managers can use to recover any negative experiences – and instantly recover those at risk.
Responsive Website
Whether it’s incorporating messaging, providing more options for online ordering, or offering more payment methods, staying on top of website technology trends is important to keep your business relevant and efficient.
According to Wolfgang Jaegel, 83% of mobile users say that a seamless experience across all devices is very important. We live in an extremely digitized world where everyone wants fast and engaging experiences regardless of what device or channel they choose.
Your website should be mobile and tablet responsive, allowing customers to view your menu, order, ask questions, and provide feedback on the device of their choice. Having different options available for interaction means a more engaging experience for customers and potentially greater revenue opportunities for your brand.
Building loyal customers and maximizing your restaurant’s revenue can be challenging at first. However, by focusing on the customer experience and adopting efficient technologies to aid your restaurant, you’re well on your way to boosting your bottom line.
Do you want to drive efficiency with your Loop conversations? Read our blog post: Tips and Tools : Loop Inbox™ Conversations
