You are looking for a sustainable business and there are multiple ways to do it but a key factor is creating customer engagement. With many competitive restaurants and different concepts, keeping your customers engaged requires commitment and dedication.

 Repeat customers should be your favorite since a repeat customer spends up to 67% more than a new customer. Repeat customers create dependable and regular revenues according to a Harvard Business School study as a 5% increase in customer retention leads to a 25% to 95% increase in profits.

It all starts with creating customer engagement that equally retains your existing customers and brings you new ones.

What is customer engagement?

With the various definitions of customer engagement term, it refers, in the end to your interactions with your customers and how happy you can keep them during each stage of these interactions. Customer engagement starts with the first contact with your business and it extends beyond the purchase point to create ongoing interactions.

These ongoing interactions with your brand mean that your customers are engaged with you. Customers reading your content and reacting to it whether in blogs, social media, or websites is called engagement.

Customer engagement with your restaurant is crucial to create an emotional bond with your customers when they are not purchasing or consuming your products. It will lead them to choose your restaurant whenever they are prompted to make a decision related to choosing a restaurant.

Customer engagement starts in person but goes beyond it.

Ways to create customer engagement

Collect feedback and create dialogue

You cannot please everyone, but collecting feedback is essential to identify and resolve issues.

You can easily lose an unhappy customer without even identifying the reason, so requesting feedback helps you spot the problem and resolve it before you lose your customers.

FlexSurv is a digital platform linked directly to your POS and CRM that gives your customers the chance to provide you with their honest and transparent feedback in a very simple way.

With this platform, you won’t be guessing the reason for losing customers to your competitors or your customers’ preferences. It gives you accurate data to help you with the decision-making process and your future strategies.

Create a loyalty and rewards program

A study published by the national restaurant association found that customers increase their business by 35% if they had an appealing loyalty card program and recommend your restaurant to their friends and families which proves that loyalty programs work. Customers with loyalty programs increase the frequency of their visits as well to collect more points or rewards.

So, creating a loyalty or rewards program increases customer retention and engagement because it is a powerful communication tool.

How?

Signing up for the rewards program requires information and data that are kept in the CRM. You will be sharing emails with your customers about their latest rewards and updates about the redemption system in addition to customized text messages on their birthdays and special occasions reinforcing your interactions and creating a strong bond with them.  

Interact on social media

Establish your relationship with your customers using social media. It’s your best interaction tool to keep them updated with your news and offers. It’s also your way of communicating your brand to them.

Keep them engaged with games, questions, charades, menu updates, and posts on all occasions, and ask them for their opinion on different platters, especially new ones.

Increasing social media engagement increases loyalty, especially to millennials that rely on it in their decision-making. Interactions with your posts, tagging you in their stories, and reacting to your stories keep you in your customer’s minds.

Engage customers with email

Email communication is such a big deal!!

Email marketing is a simple yet effective way to communicate with your customers and it can be done to the mass to update them about any recent event or change or in a customized way to customers on their birthday for instance or to inform them about their loyalty program news.

Allow guests to sign up for your newsletter to receive emails on regular basis as long as they have good content or interesting news that doesn’t end up in their deleted folder.

Customer engagement gives a competitive advantage over other restaurants if handled properly. It’s not a one-time thing. It requires dedication and commitment to create the best customer experience.