In today’s digital world, you might as a restaurant owner face a lot of pressure when it comes to managing your restaurant brand, pampering the customers, measuring the performance, forecasting unforeseen events that could possibly happen at any time, and above all setting your restaurant apart from the competition. Below are some key steps that can help you ace the restaurant game while staying on the cutting edge of technology.
1. Focus on value and uniqueness
The value here goes beyond the price—In fact, it’s more about gathering information about your ideal audience's needs and wants and knowing how to deliver it in a consistent manner. Rather than just wondering, you can go to their tables and ask them directly about their feedback or simply conduct a survey. It’s important to know your customers very well and if you’re missing out on something critical, try to identify it to solve it quickly.
2. Make sure your staff are well-trained
If you want your staff and waiters to appeal to the audience, you have to equip them with the sufficient tools and skills needed to make them motivated and capable of doing their job properly. You can start by onboarding them on their assigned roles and setting clear goals and expectations for how they should fulfill them. And then provide a customized training module to develop both their technical and soft skills. Always remember that your staff is the point of contact between you and your customers. So, you have to ensure that they’re very well-trained and satisfied with the working conditions.
3. Leverage the power of technology
You’re probably faced with numerous responsibilities to keep your day-to-day restaurant brand running smoothly. Therefore, technology often gets put on the back burner, however, it’s very important to take advantage of technology’s latest gadgets and educate your staff about them for epic results. [talk about POS] For instance, integrating POS software can be a great choice for restaurant owners who want to increase their brand efficiency and attract quality customers.
4. Optimize your menu
Always highlight the popular menu dishes that your clients frequently ask for and cross out the expensive or least ordered ones. By doing so, you can regularly make optimizations to the menu and it could also be a great chance to go seamless with the scanned digital menus where your customers can effortlessly open up the menu on their smartphones after they scan the QR code that’s placed on the table or the entrance of your restaurant and make the entire ordering process peace of cake.
5. Reward loyal guests
It’s the best thing you can do to increase your customer retention and boost your repeat rate. Loyal customers are more likely to come back again and spread the word. By setting up a loyalty program, you can have a better understanding of your customers’ behavior and develop the perfect loyalty program that’s tailored for them. We’ve listed everything you need to know about loyalty in the food and beverage industry.
6. Stand out on social media
Research by modern restaurant management has shown that 80% of your perspectives check a restaurant’s online presence and reviews before they go there the first time. Social media allows you to show off your restaurant, connect with your existing and future customers, and the best part is that it can be a powerful tool to stay on top of their minds when engaging consistently with them. Aside from that, you should consider investing in social media because it lets you understand what enhancements you need to make in order to attract more customers. It could be something like launching a new menu or adjusting your business hours.
“To be successful, you must match the way you market your products with the way your prospects learn about and shop for your products.” – Brian Halligan, HubSpot
7. Adapt contactless payment
One simple and effective way to promote how trendy, convenient and safe your restaurant is—is to promote contactless payments. Through contactless payments your guests can instantly pay with their smartphone’s mobile wallet by hovering their phone over your card reader. Using a contactless payment method will help you increase your restaurant sales—not just because it takes less time, but also a Mastercard study has found out that customers who rely on touchless payments spend 30% more than do card "swipers.”
Conclusion
As the restaurant industry changes rapidly in response to the increasing expectations from customers, you have to provide a meaningful customer experience. In particular, stop blending in with the crowd by doing what every other restaurant is doing and focus on how to adapt new techniques that will provide you with the needed insights you can use to deliver an exceptional and tailored customer experience.
