5 Ways to Improve Customer Retention in Hospitality Business

Own a restaurant or a hospitality business? If yes, then the first thing on your priority list would be to acquire new customers along with retaining existing customers. Acquiring new customers is a very tedious process and requires more time and effort when compared to retaining the existing ones. It cannot be simply achieved by giving some tasty food and good services.

Let’s see how this works?

The first and foremost thing in any business is making your customers your brand advocates and it can only be achieved by having healthy and fruitful customer engagement. Following are the 5 most important customer retention strategies one has to adapt to create exceptional customer experiences.

1. Privileged Offers:

Make your customer feel special, remember their likes and dislikes, and offer customized discounts & special benefits. “59% said their opinion of a brand would be more positive if they started to receive coupons and offers that could be saved on their smartphones” Providing offers and discounts to your customers is a great way to attract them and drive them to your brand. But how do you make those customers your loyal customers? Answer is really simple;

Make your customers happy & how would you do that?

One way to make them happy and keep them connected to your brand is through delighting your customers by sending wishes and greetings on their special occasions. The other way is by providing them some special offers and discounts.

How does this help in your business?

Most people have a tendency to go out to celebrate their special occasions like birthdays and anniversaries, when you send a personalized greeting to your loyal customers, chances are they’ll surely remember you when they plan to go out for the celebration. When they come to your restaurant, offer them more benefits and discounts, or give them something free like a meal on the house. This will not only delight them but also increases the sales, as the person who comes to celebrate the special occasion, usually comes in with their family and friends who end up ordering more and becoming your loyal customers too. Now the question arises is, How to create the customized offers for an individual customer and how to keep track of it?

Answer is L1.Loyalty…!!

With the help of L1.Loyalty software, you can create customized offers and promote them to individual customers, or a group of customers, based on gender, age, profession, and much more. You can easily track your customer behaviors with L1.Loyalty dashboard. Not only that, you can also create customized offers and promotions for customers who haven’t visited your restaurant from quite a long time to just say them – “We Miss You”. You even have options to send a customized e-mail or an SMS saying you miss them. This will make them more likely to visit your restaurant and instills goodwill towards your brand.

2. Reward your Loyal Customers

Now that you are successfully able to bring your customer to your restaurant and made them feel privileged, it’s time to make them as your brand advocates by rewarding them with some more benefits.

The first thing to do is to make them revisit your restaurant, is by using a loyalty program. Having a loyalty program to manage and create the offers plays a major role in alluring customers back to your restaurant. All you have to do is just offer to provide guests with some reward points that they can redeem into discounts or cash back or a free item on your menu etc. “81% of consumers are more likely to continue doing business with brands that offer loyalty programs” The most important point to remember is that you have to always customize the loyalty program based on the customer’s interests. One cannot simply achieve fruitful results by running generic loyalty program for each and every customer. “73% of loyalty programs members are more likely to recommend brands with good loyalty programs”

Why do your loyalty program may fail?

The main factor that leads to the failure of a loyalty program is – Lack of active customers, the more active your customers are, the more successful your loyalty program will be.

What makes your customers inactive?

If major % of your loyalty customers is inactive, then it can be due to various reasons; The major reason is the dependency on loyalty cards; I.e. In case a customer forgets to carry their membership card, they are as good as a new customer and cannot avail of any offers or discounts. It can be because of a lack of proper and relevant offers and promotions or it can also be because of a lack of quality of services, which an individual restaurant has to take care of.

How to overcome this situation?

This is where L1.Loyalty comes into the picture. L1.Loyalty is cloud-based loyalty software through which you can create, customize, and manage your loyalty program from any part of the world. L1.Loyalty is completely cardless loyalty program that can be customized especially for any business type, so even if the customer forgets to bring the loyalty/membership card, they can simply use their phone number for identification.

3. Analyze and Measure the ROI of Loyal Customers.

You are now successfully able to convert your visitor to customers and those customers to your loyal customers. The next thing you have to do is measure the ROI of those loyal customers. Measuring and analyzing your customer base is one of the major parts of your business.

How to analyze the ROI?

Solution is POS Integration. Integrating your POS or billing software with loyalty software will help you in analyzing your customer’s behavior in detail. With L1.Loyalty you can see the detailed reports of an individual customer and drill down into location wise, month wise, day wise, invoice number wise even till line item wise. With this data you can analyze the individual customer purchase pattern and can create offers and promotions which are suitable for that customer behavior and take decisions of your business efficiently. Your customers are the privileged members of your brand. Therefore, we have taken all the necessary measures to ensure that, no matter which outlet your customers go, they always feel valued and loved. L1.Loyalty provide a centralized CRM system, helps a multi-location business owner to access, analyze and plan based on the data available. Not only that, L1.Loyalty centralized CRM software and loyalty program modules also allow the customers to see, claim and reserve the offers and discounts running across all branches.

Customer Engagement: Show your customers that you really care them.

Taking your customer feedback is not enough; implementing those feedback’s in your business model will make customers more attracted and more loyal towards your brand. It is an effective and successful way of improving both your business and customer engagement.

How customer engagement does help in business improvement?

Customer engagement is a great way to know how your customers feel about your services and it gives you initial insights into your faults. Based on the customer engagement, Implement the feedbacks and rectify the mistakes/faults and let your customers know that you really care them. It makes your customer feel more privileged and surely helps in boosts their loyalty to another level. For any business, it is always a good initiative to share customer reviews with your other guests, as it adds credibility to your brand. There are many ways to engage with your customers, one of them is gathering customer feedback’s.

How to gather feedbacks?

Simply by presenting them a feedback form or comment card at the end of their meal in your restaurant, or you can send them an email after their every visit to your restaurant asking for their views and opinions on your hospitality services. L1.Loyalty help you to effortlessly achieve the great feedback management by providing paperless feedback system. Customers can give their opinion or feedback through a tablet / mobile device which is integrated with your POS. This ensures that you get the actual feedback and insights of the individual customers and can be implemented or showed when visits you the next time. You can then compare the feedback with that of previous and measure your service improvements. “97% of consumers said they are somewhat likely to become more loyal to a company that implements their feedback”

4. Regular Updates: Always keep your customers updated.

Keeping your customers updated about your business is always essential. Use your marketing skills to boost up the customer engagement. Always tell your customers about the latest things happening like new campaign you’re about to start, or special offers or discounts of this weekend, any latest updates about your software, new tie-ups with the brands etc. It is an outstanding idea to prepare a calendar of events, and start sending it to your valuable customers so they can block their dates for future visits.You should always make your customers as an integral part of your restaurant by including them in your milestones.