Communication is vital to survive!
How a customer become regular in a restaurant? The first
thing is the excellent food, then the environment, ambiance, music, and for sure the service.
One of the vital elements of customer loyalty is good service and good interaction with the restaurant staff. The superb staff knows the customer, communicates with her, and caters to the service as she expects and likes. So, one of the keys to good customer experience is COMMUNICATION!
The customer feels good when the restaurant recognizes her
as a frequent guest. The recognition happens when she visits the place! Today, the visit might not happen!
Today, restaurants need to have a presence in cyberspace.
Website, online ordering, social media, digital marketing all are the activities restaurants need to consider for a digital transformation to adjust to the new norm of the business. And they need to elevate personal communication with their guests to the cyberspace.
Can we consider marketing as communication? Well, yes. It’s
a communication with the mass and not necessarily one to one. Same as the website and social media page. They miss the personal touch of face to face communication in the restaurant. But still, restaurateurs need to bring that personal touch to the mix of their digital presence.
Before the current pandemic, in Dubai, we were promoting customer engagement and maintaining communication with the existing client base through digital means. The restaurateurs’ answer, in many cases, was that they need to get new customers. They thought the existing ones would eventually come again! Today, we are seeing that’s not necessarily happening! There is no new customer as before, and the existing ones also are cautious and don’t visit restaurants often.
So, what is the solution?
The solution is not a quick fix, but it needs to be considered and get enough attention. Restaurants need to know their customers and communicate with them more often through all the digital channels and engage with them. And, encourage the conversation in digital form, and bring the personal touch to it.
If a restaurant does not collect the clients’ information, it needs to start to manage and to build the customer list up. The restaurant needs to make any form of digital presence, a web site, a social page, and it should begin communicating with the customers.
The communication should not be limited to posting promotions and marketing messages. Sharing experiences, and telling customers what they do during the quarantine time, and what they want to do in the short or the long run is helping to give a more natural face to the communication.
The restaurant usually collect reviews through many channels, how about they give a review of their operations, experiences, and plans to their customers even before they collect the customers’ review.
This communication is the story of the restaurant to be told. Everyone has a story and worth telling. And always there are some people like to hear it. Let’s put a human face to the digital being of your restaurant.