How to increase guest advocacy by +10%

Existing customers can be your most powerful growth-generating asset, if you engage with them and make sure they get your full brand experience. 

They’ll spend more per visit, return more often and generate word of mouth advertising, bringing in new customers. 

Achieving positive guest sentiment and bringing them back means reducing customer churn through a well executed  brand delivery. As George Wetz, Yumpingo’s CEO said in a recent webinar: 

“Once you’ve set that [brand promise], It’s important to be delivering on that, executing on it every single day, every location. And the reason why that’s so important is because people have this expectation about the restaurant when they go in. And if you don’t meet that, it causes churn in the customer base.”

Advocacy as a performance predictor

At Yumpingo, we looked at our guest sentiment data, and noticed that on average 62% of restaurant guests leave happy, so a lot of time, restaurants are achieving that goal. However, there’s always room to bring up more guests into that important word of mouth advocacy space. 

On a busy shift it can be enough to let the team know they’ve done a great job and never think about those guests again. But unpacking the steps of service and menu items that made that guest happy unlocks an opportunity to not only replicate that across future guest experiences, but improve and bring them back time after time. Hopefully with more and more friends.

Equally, you could be so busy managing the small number of unhappy guests that you miss out on using those happy guests as a marketing asset and a free source of increased customers?

Measuring word of mouth

Word of mouth can be hard to directly measure and many of the methods don’t present enough insights to allow you to grow it. 

Marketing teams are left focusing the majority of their efforts on customer retention or spending precious budgets to acquire new customers. 

“Recovering and promptness is very, very important for those times when things go wrong.” George Wetx, CEO, Yumpingo.

We developed Yumpingo to help you:

1. Accurately track your promoters in real-time to measure success.

2. Understand what your customers love – providing great marketing content and campaigns.

3. Actively engage those advocates to build your customer base – by enabling a sentiment-focused CRM strategy to build out your loyalty program or drive up your online reviews, using the (currently) silent majority to balance the vocal minority seen on social media feedback channels.

Substantial improvements are often seen in online reviews too, such as this example from Hickory’s Smokehouse:

6 steps for improving positive word of mouth feedback

The method we propose means your marketing and operations teams can work together to focus on delivering great experiences.

1. The customer leaves a positive review after their meal and leaves their email.

2. You immediately follow-up with that customer to encourage them to leave a positive online review.

3. Build your email marketing list to be segmented by sentiment so you can focus marketing messages and rewards schemes towards promoters.

4. General managers (GMs) use the positive comments from the advocates to build team morale and enhance training to deliver great services.

5. Meanwhile the GM fixes issues highlighted in Smart Actions, because even good experiences can be improved, to increase the Net Promoter Score.

6. Replicate the above across the estate, building a culture of rewarding customer advocacy so that word of mouth promotion increases.

This simple process can be easily repeated and adapted for the unique ways your teams work. But it starts with having the right insights into guest sentiment feedback. 

Things can go wrong during a shift, and understanding why helps you recover. We’ll leave the last word to George again: 

“The evidence that I’ve seen both from our own platform and customers, and from various industry reports is: fundamentally the more happy guests and customers you can have because you meet their experience, the better the business is run and the more customers you get. And I think recovering and promptness is very, very important for those times when things go wrong.”

To find out more about how Yumpingo can help you transform your online reputation and increase customer advocacy by +10% – get in touch with us today!