Retaining Your Best Customers: Key Strategies for Restaurant Success

Retaining customers is crucial to a restaurant being successful. While of course getting new customers through the door is fantastic, it can be 6-7 times more expensive to attract new diners in comparison to retaining old ones. 

In order to combat this, restaurants should aim to create brand loyalty by delivering excellent customer service, especially as loyal customers tend to return often and spend more, helping businesses profit. 

After all, highly satisfied customers are worth 3.5 times more than  satisfied customers and 16 times more than unsatisfied customers, reinforcing the importance of delivering exceptional service and retaining diners.

Deliver outstanding customer service 

Outstanding customer service can be subjective, so it’s essential that you provide excellent experiences to really nail the service your team provides.

If there are certain sites struggling to retain customers, using customer feedback will uncover what’s going wrong, so you can find a way to fix it. A lot of the time there may be small mistakes that have an easy resolution.

What can customer feedback identify? 

• Understanding employees’ strengths and weaknesses – If feedback shows staff at particular sites are getting low NPS (Net Promoter Scores) or customer complaints, it may indicate there’s a training issue. This also gives you the opportunity to discuss with staff whether they need further support in specific areas. 

• Quality of dishes – Food quality plays a huge part in impressing new customers and converting them into loyal fans. When you collect data on the plates that are being served, it’s easier to find ways to improve them and get the experience right every single time. 

This customer feedback data is worth its weight in gold, and the great news is that getting access to it is really easy, thanks to Yumpingo’s Customer Experience Management Platform. We collate data across your POS, CRMm booking and more, and then deliver visual, easy to understand visualizations and smart actions that help you make the best decisions for your business. 

Our system uses emails and in-store devices to gather feedback tailored to the dishes the customer has eaten. This means you have insights on every dish, giving you the opportunity to get really detailed reviews that can drive menu decisions.

Learn from customer complaints

Everyone dreads getting customer complaints, but it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad thing. Think about it – if several people are complaining about the same thing again and again,  it usually indicates there’s an underlying issue with some aspect of your service or processes. 

Showing that you’re making a conscious effort to act on complaints and improve the service, dishes and processes used within your business, can help you retain customers. 

Research by Orbelo suggests that 33% of respondents believe that good customer service would be having their issues resolved within one interaction. Making the effort to resolve customer’s issues encourages them to visit again as you’ve shown that you care and value their thoughts and feelings. 

Make data-driven decisions 

Here at Yumpingo, gathering customer feedback is the reason we exist! Gathering and reviewing feedback data is something that comes as second-nature to us. We can help you gain a big picture view of how every site across your company is performing, from a site-level and an operational level. 

This eliminates operational data silos, ensuring complete transparency, enabling data-driven decisions that are vital to your experience management and your bottom line.

When The Restaurant Group (TRG) approached Yumpingo, they wanted to find a way to exceed customer expectations while balancing the cost of living crisis with diminishing profit margins. 

Using Yumpingo’s  guest sentiment feedback they were able to get the level of detail needed from the customer at the point of sale. This meant they had a blended view of the business at every minute of every day, and were able to use actionable insights to makeinformed decisions. As a result,  Frankie and Benny’s NPS score increased by 9 points, and their unhappy customers went down by 33%. They also increased Chiquito’s NPS score by 6 points, whilst decreasing their unhappy customers by 20%. Find out more at the TRG case study page. 

Retain your best customers with Yumpingo

Yumpingo offers a seamless solution for gathering and analyzing customer feedback in the restaurant industry. The simplicity of collecting feedback and the ease of reviewing data empowers your business to obtain a comprehensive understanding of each site’s performance, both at the operational and site-specific levels. 

This approach proves essential not only for enhancing experience management but also for bolstering your bottom line. With Yumpingo’s comprehensive feedback system, retaining customers and ensuring their satisfaction becomes a streamlined and effective process, ultimately driving long-term success for your restaurants.