Customer delight: The Ultimate Way to Maximise Customer Retention - Petpooja

A restaurant is a business that primarily depends on its one-time customers, or  upon new guests. There is an inherent risk attached to any business and restaurants are no exception, especially because restaurant’s cannot live off only it’s short-term customers. Maybe to just survive, yes. But to thrive? It definitely needs repeat customers who consistently keep coming back.

And that takes winning a customer’s loyalty, which in turn takes persistence, and embracing the idea of customer delight. Not just a catchphrase, customer delight is the concept that drives a person to keep coming back for an impeccable experience and a powerful impression that a restaurant left on them. This phrase, when taken seriously, can effectively become the primary driver of huge sales for a restaurant.

To help your restaurant build long-lasting loyal relationships with its customers, we have here 4 ways that you create a delightful experience for them.

Let’s have a look at what they are…

Make Sure Your ‘Hellos’ and ‘Thank yous’ Sound Real

If only we could completely drop the usual scripted Hello, and Thank you, and Goodbye! Instead, you should train your staff to offer a more genuine and real welcome to the guests. Similarly, the same guests should be greeted and thanked for having spent their time at your restaurant. They should know how pleased you’d be to serve them again in the future. It should all sound very real, and not at all scripted.

Offer a pre-service and a post-service snack

You could try offering your guests something delicious from the menu, right when they sit down. A small bowl of soup, or a bread basket could do the trick. This little teaser even before their server arrives, will leave a fantastic first impression on your guests, and they’ll be more eager to have a meal there.

Similarly, when it’s time to leave, you can add a little something in the check presenter. It could be something other than mints maybe chocolate, or maybe even a granola bar. It always feels good to have something from the menu, free of cost, on a regular day – even if a restaurant isn’t officially giving out any discounts, or there isn’t a festive season special or weekend special going on. Give your guests a reason to want to revisit you; present them with a wonderful dining experience.

The Staff Should Know the Menu Through and Through

Your staff should know the menu from A to Z. They should be able to explain the dishes so well that the person ordering becomes hungrier and curious. Kit just the names of the dishes, but also specific dietary information about each of the menu items, even if they don’t know all the ingredients. So, if a guest wants to know if a dish is gluten-free, or if they’re looking for a vegan something, their server shouldn’t have to check with the kitchen. If the menu itself is quite detailed, with every item followed by the list ingredients that went into making it, then the guests might not have any confusion. But even then, a server must be more than just acquainted with the restaurant menu.

Loyalty and Reward Programs

Then there are loyalty programs, which go a long way in establishing a great customer relationship. With technology making progress, we now have softwares that can simultaneously hold loyalty programs for a number of restaurants. So, as it was in the past, the excuse of technology doesn’t hold today.

A surefire way to gain the patronage of your customers, and make them into repeat customers for a long long time, is by rewarding them. The more investment you make towards building a reward system based on loyalty, the less you’ll have to spend  on getting new customers which would be much trickier. An effective CRM system is what can help you personalize the future experiences of your customers by recording their preferences and even eating and spending behaviors, every time they visit you. Petpooja offers an integrated CRM system at your disposal records and accumulates a detailed guest profile, every time there’s a sign-up and order. So, if you’re thinking of giving a pre- or post-meal snack, free of cost off the menu, you can have a customized choice for every guest that come in by looking at their past ordering patterns and records. You can further give out free tickets to movies, events, etc., and personalize promotions and offers that are tailored to match the guest preferences.

There’s been a lot of research, and it’s been seen that restaurants earn no less than 46% more with such loyalty programs. About 36% people have said they love the access to exclusive coupons and deals, and more than 50% are happy with the ease of earning points as well as redeeming them for rewards.

Delight is about anticipating what your guests want, and upping their expectations of you. That is how the concept of customer delight truly works, and creates raving fans out of regular customers!

At PetPooja, a leading restaurant integrator in the country, we have brought together a great number of unique restaurants. We have helped them improve their service and create delightful customer experiences through our dedicated CRM component. So managing customers with Petpooja is just a child’s play.