In a context of heightened competition between restaurants, creating more customer engagement is a way of standing out from the crowd and boosting sales. Discover the best methods, easily applicable to restaurant chains!
From city centers to suburbs, competition between restaurants is more intense than ever. To stay ahead of the game, restaurateurs have an effective lever at their disposal: creating customer engagement. More than just a buzzword, it's a real source of business development! It's based on a simple objective: to multiply interactions, particularly from your customers to you.
There's only one step from customer engagement to loyalty. The first is to increase the frequency of visits, but also of all other possible interactions - based on opportunities created by you. This is the key to retaining customers after they've come to you the first time!
When a customer engagement strategy works, it's the customers who come to you. Interactions are customer-initiated, based on what the restaurant has to offer. How can you offer them more opportunities to engage with you? That's what we'll look at below!
To create customer engagement as a restaurant chain, it's essential to first harmonize the customer experience from one restaurant to the next. This may be self-evident for some, especially franchises, but it's worth remembering if you want to understand customer engagement.
Customers (whether of a restaurant or any other business) engage with a brand first and foremost. Harmonizing brands can be achieved through a number of levers, many of which will ultimately generate engagement. For example: define your missions and values, use the web and social networks to enrich the customer experience, launch a loyalty program, etc. To find out more, we explain how to harmonize customer XP between several restaurants in this article.
For the last two tips, you can kill two birds with one stone with the Pongo loyalty program. Loyalty is the best form of engagement, since it directly generates traffic.
A loyalty program is a real link between several visits, and enables you to keep customers coming back through well-thought-out (and contextualized) SMS messages. Ideally, it's based on motivating rewards that reflect your image, to multiply customer traffic. The best way? Playful, interactive tablets that fill in waiting times, near checkouts or on tables. They allow you to use downtime to enrich the experience.
In the end, all these methods help to create greater commitment between a customer and a restaurant. And they don't just apply to chain restaurants! But having several brands will give you more clout and generate even more interactions, for even greater loyalty-building effects.
