5 Old Habits Restaurants or Cafés Need to Discard

1. Deploying a uniform loyalty program for all customers of yours

It is no secret that you need to make your customers coming to your restaurant or cafe feel special so that you can build your brand on their individual needs. However, while devising a reward program for them, you need to consider the fact that each of your customer is different, has different preferences, interacts with your brand in a different way and has a different profile. So you need to devise totally different solutions for customers who have been acquired recently by you from those who have been your loyal customers for years. You need to devise a totally different strategies for young and old customers.

So, it is important that you have proper knowledge of your customer base before you design a loyalty program for them.

2. Giving irrelevant offers to your customers

Your customers form the basis of your loyalty program and so you should know everything about them. This information helps you to design the type of call-to-action or type of offer that is most appealing to them. However, if you don’t possess the necessary information about your customer profile, or adopt a scattered approach, your efforts are likely to fail. In such circumstances, you are bound to overwhelm your customers with too many irrelevant offers. This runs the risk of alienating your customers. You need to beware of this habit.

 

3. Not using Location-based marketing

With the spread of the smartphone technology, restaurant or cafe owners can tap the potential of location based marketing approach. Being stuck with the age old methods doesn’t help in this era of cutting edge technology. Restaurant owners can use the location based marketing approach as a tool to increase their ROI. By pairing location based marketing with increasingly accurate customer data, restaurant owners can attract customer footfalls in clever ways.

Customers can use their smartphones to find the nearest restaurant or cafe to them and restaurant owners on the other hand can push tailored offers and alerts when customers are near their outlets. Such type of location based marketing using the smartphones can be used to target the potential customers through niche interests, behaviors and demographics.

Location based marketing helps you to deliver restaurant specific, localized advertising content during peak and off peak hours to drive the requisite traffic to your restaurant or cafe by local awareness.

4. Not using automated upsell/cross-sell during the ordering process

By using mobile for the ordering process, offering the upsell or cross sell at a relevant time and situation helps the boosting the sales of a restaurant a lot. Such a kind of situation helps the customers to think about the other kind of items they may like to order that best complement their dish of choice and waiters are completely away from this process.

By ordering through the mobile, the customers themselves take the decision of making of upgrade to their order and the pressure for cross selling and up selling on the waiters and manager is nullified. Recent research suggests that when customers are more relaxed and not under pressure to order, they actually order more.

5. Not establishing a unique identity of your own

The reputation of your restaurant depends on the ability of the restaurant owners to create a specific brand of the restaurant or cafe and build that brand. Many new restaurant owners fall in the trap of getting into an identity crisis, not building their brand, and thus failing to offer something new to their customers.

It has been observed that cafes that are successful are able to develop a specific cafe theme, develop a good reputation of themselves and attract customers based on the strength of their brand.

Every cafe owner should remember the fact that besides food and drink, what they are selling to the customer is a comforting and a royal experience. So they should eliminate every hurdle that comes in the way of letting the customers experience such kind of a royal experience.

How Voolsy can help you rectify these mistakes

First of all, Voolsy can help you devise an excellent loyalty program. With Voolsy, you get detailed cross sectional information of your customers and you can also record their individual preferences and past buying behaviors. This helps you to devise an individualized loyalty program for each of your customer based on their customer profile and preferences. This will definitely take your loyalty program towards success.

For making targeted offers to your customers, Voolsy can help you capture the must needed customer data via the ordering process. By such accurate and targeted information, you can create offers that are customized for each of your customer and offers that are relevant for each of your customer. Voolsy helps you in this process as it helps you to build a solid customer profile knowledge base.

Voolsy can help the restaurant and cafe owners in location based marketing as well since it is working on the iBeacon technology. This technology can be gelled perfectly with location based marketing and the hardware required for this process is already present in the Voolsy app. This enables the owners to adopt the process of location based marketing at a cost far lower to their competitors and stay ahead of the competition.

Voolsy can help owners in cross-selling and up-selling as all the ordering process from our app is based on ordering through the mobile. No waiter or manager is involved during the ordering process of the customer and this helps in up selling and cross selling of the various other items in the menu of the restaurant or cafe that is available in the mobile of the customer itself, along with their picture of the various dishes.

Voolsy helps the owners to elevate their customer experience to a totally new level. By streamlining the process right from the occupying the table, ordering, customizing the order and paying, Voolsy enables the customers have a great experience. This in turn gives a favorable experience to the customers who have a positive opinion of the restaurant they visited. This helps in building the brand of the restaurant and in turn helps in developing a unique identity for themselves based on first class service and a fantastic customer experience.