Opening a new restaurant location or introducing a new concept involves significant risk, and finding ways to manage and mitigate them can be challenging. If the launch stalls or the concept fails, it can damage your brand's reputation, decrease customer intake, and reduce profits.
Research indicates that 30% of restaurants fail within their first year. After 3 years, the failure rate is closer to 50%. Unsuccessful launches play a major role in these statistics, highlighting the importance of taking the right steps to ensure success.
Are you looking to launch a new restaurant or concept? Read on to learn more about the challenges restaurants face and how they can be solved.
There are a few types of concepts that restaurants can implement, such as:
Launching a new restaurant or concept is, without a doubt, stressful. They’re a huge investment that aren’t guaranteed to be successful. They can cost a lot of time and money, which can put a drain on restaurant resources. When they perform well that financial and resource investment is recouped. But when they fail it can massively affect employee morale, profits and brand reputation.
Other challenges restaurants face include:
It may seem obvious but unsuccessful launches can have a significant negative impact on a brand’s reputation. This especially rings true when a concept launch doesn’t meet the standards of the rest of the business.
For example, let’s say you’re opening a takeaway and/or delivery service. But you have a consistent issue with items being missed in the order or orders being delivered late. In the early days and weeks of the new store, you won’t have enough positive brand reputation reviews to make negative comments seem insignificant.
Those negative comments are definitely going to affect your overall brand reputation. This not only affects the new store, but can lead to a decline in customers in all store locations, causing profits to fall and motivation to dip among employees.
Many restaurants find it difficult to measure how well their new location or concept is performing. With detailed customer feedback, it becomes much easier to understand whether any early operating issues are affecting your brand reputation. It also helps by identifying any important changes you need to make.
New concepts or locations are expensive. It’s not just about investing in new technology or building new venues. Restaurants will also need to hire new teams, such as servers and back of house and marketing teams.
This can be costly as staff will need training so that they can memorise the menu items and use any new equipment in the restaurant. That training will take a while to become send nature to them, and there will always be issues when teams come under pressure during busy periods. No training can prepare you for the reality of a full restaurant on a saturday night! All of which can cause some confusion on or after the launch, potentially leading to below-par service.
New restaurants often face hurdles like inexperienced staff and improper menu pricing, both of which can lead to business closure. But when you get these right they can be the key to long-term success.
Teams can also become hyper- focused on the details of the launch making it hard for them to keep on top of everything. This can cause things to be missed or poor quality training to be delivered, all of which can set the launch up for failure.
While there are a few risks when launching a new concept or venue location, there are ways you can mitigate them. This is where Yumpingo steps in. We work with our customers to help them successfully launch their ideas with little to no risk.
We gather detailed customer feedback on service levels and dishes, either at your existing locations, or from day one of a new concept launch. This enables you to understand where you need to improve in your current restaurants before you go forward with your concept launch. This allows you to prepare for your launch, knowing what guests enjoy about your brand and that your reputation is strong and you have loyal customers.
Using Smart Actions and the support of our customer success team, we’ll help you make quick changes that are guaranteed to increase customer satisfaction. Apply those changes to your launch and you’ll know what keeps your diners happy and what their expectations are. This gives you the foundations you need to create goals and measure success.
If you’re considering launching a new idea in the future, gathering customer feedback is a great place to start. We’ll gather all the information you need to launch with confidence and ensure success.
When working with Yo! we implemented our 1-minute surveys in preparation for the launch of their new concept YO! Kitchen in Westfield White City & Dundrum. The feedback we gathered allowed them to successfully introduce their new concept, as well as make menu changes and adaptations to specific dishes.
We’ll work with you to launch your new concepts across all restaurants or in just a select few. We recommend testing your idea within a control group (a select number of venues) to measure performance and understand its strengths and weaknesses. This will allow you to completely nail the concept when it comes to implementing it within all venues. We do this to help you speed up the process of learning what to improve on so that you can maintain customer satisfaction and a strong brand reputation.
Our market research solution also enables you to ask tailored questions to your customers, such as ‘how far did you travel to get to our restaurant’ so that you can measure the things that matter to you.
We worked with a major restaurant chain with over 300 locations to address their issues with missing items within their deliveries. We helped them reduce this by creating a checklist to ensure everything is included in the bags. As a result, these incidents were reduced by 10% and they achieved an increase of 11 NPS points.
During this, we found that it’s important to fix issues quickly to increase customer satisfaction levels and provide excellent customer service. It’s important to emulate the same excellent standards as the rest of your services do to ensure your guests keep coming back.
Looking to launch a new restaurant concept in 2024? Speak to our experts today and hear how we’re already helping the likes of Yo! minimize performance issues and maximize impact to ensure their brands continue to be a huge hit.