Restaurant Loyalty & Retention Survey
A collection of ideas and learnings based on the experiences of restaurants nowadays
As part of the GloriaFood platform design process, we have made field trips and talked with many small restaurant owners and managers trying to understand why, what and how their business is working. This was a very rewarding experience and helped us create many simple but highly useful techniques to streamline the ordering process and simplify our setup to the max.
Surprisingly, we realized that many restaurants are rarely leveraging their loyal customer base. Some of them were not even aware of the importance of customer loyalty. This is why we decided to develop this section and actively share the things we gathered so far.
As an example, one of the main probing questions was: "What are you doing today offline and online to make people keep returning to your restaurant again and again?"
So we hereby tried to coagulate the most frequent answers into a bunch of generic profiles as detailed below:
"We have the best prices and this is why people are coming to order. They tell each other about us, they use the mobile apps of our partners (n.n. Foodpanda, Grubhub, etc), save our number in the agenda, etc. So we do not need to care about this. As we serve anyone, we are focused on getting orders, not on getting people. I do have a website page but that’s not so important."
"We do regular flyer-distribution in the area. We give flyers with every order. People eat the food, if they like it they keep the flyer and then order again from it. Yes, we do have a website but frankly speaking the site is the same as the flyer and it’s meant for those that forgot our hotline number, to google us and retrieve our number this way. Also, the cool part is that if you don’t find our flyer, you can always go there and have it like a virtual flyer."
"We try to make the food quality as high as possible. (n.n. quality => interpreted as good/healthy/fresh/tasty). People reach out to us for the food first so we rely on our food to keep people coming back ordering from us directly, over the phone, our partners’ mobile apps etc. We also have a very nice website with nice pictures and a great design.
We invested a bit in it but I think it pays off. We thought that people who want to recommend us would probably send a link of our page to their friends so we want to make a first good impression. Also the online bloggers that may write about us are sensitive to a nice website."
"We promote the hotline number and website on our packaging, flyers, etc. If people have thrown away the flyer or package at least they will remember the site, go there and order again for pick-up or delivery. It is easy to find us anyway even if they don’t remember the site exactly as we are SEO optimized. Also, on the website we have a nice menu and a cool gallery of fast loading pictures so people can get inspired on what they want and engage with us.
We have also tried an online ordering solution that was sending orders as email to us. But we kept missing some emails or answering too late so after a few bad incidents we decided to take it out."
"We do flyer distribution in our area but only in public places like hotels, shops, dental care, etc. We also do packaging promotions, website and Facebook page. From time to time we also gather phone numbers of people that called us more than twice and send them an sms to join our Facebook page or to check our daily specials and call us back. We also post things on our Facebook page (like new menu dishes, special events, etc).
To touch base with people that prefer online ordering I am working with a couple of those restaurant aggregators (n.n. Grubhub, Foodpanda, etc) but I am not comfortable to send my loyal customers ordering online over there...you know it’s like encouraging them to try other restaurants. Until now I could not find a really good online ordering system and frankly speaking I think people prefer calling."
So more than half of the restaurants we spoke will spend regularly thousands of dollars on food display & storage equipments, neon logos, specific furniture etc. Also every month they pay hundreds of dollars on printing flyers, menus, personalized packaging and food serving items, order-handling personnel, stock management software and others, yet they do so little to use the latest technologies for the loyalty and retention part of their business.
Most of them see the online space as another way to hook-up with additional customers, yet very few perceive the online customer as a different type (of customer) that needs to be understood and therefore served in his own environment: the online environment.
It seems there is very little knowledge about how you can combine classic investments with very affordable, yet so effective online marketing tools like Facebook page, own site, online submissions and other means of online marketing exposure.
We have discovered that many restaurants are really struggling to put together some marketing resources. Almost all have a Facebook/website of at least one page and that’s pretty much their entire online identity control. Most of them were not even aware of their re-listings on various go-out portals locally.