Have you ever wondered why you spend so much on advertising but don’t see enough new customers in your restaurant?
Or why your customers are not leaving feedback after they order from your restaurant?
Today, I will be showing you three things to AVOID so that you get more customers and feedback for your restaurant.
The Point of Sale Pathway
The first step is the Point of Sale Pathway. Why is it called the Point of Sale Pathway?
It is because the sales technology that restaurants use is called a Point of Sale System. Assets like the cash register are called a point of sale.
The point of sale pathway has helped me get up to 17.51x return on investment for one of my restaurant clients.
And by following the advice I am about to give you, you too can see numbers like these!
I’m going to show you how to get customers from where they are right now, all the way to the point of sale.
How do you get a customer from just looking at reviews, or looking at your Instagram to actually going inside your restaurant to dine in your restaurant?
My positioning on it is that it’s a pathway, right? Every customer goes through a step-by-step process to make a decision on whether or not they want to visit your restaurant.
Restaurants usually think “Hey, I need more customers. I’m going to advertise on Facebook. I’m going to put a picture of my food and then I’m going to get more customers!”
Right?
But what they’re doing, is they’re just putting this ad out there, and it’s not trackable.
Their thought process is usually like “Hey, here’s an ad” and if they bring customers in, that’s great, but, if they don’t bring customers in, then it’s a failing ad. Sometimes it’s not the ad that is failing, but it is actually the customer experience after they see that ad that is failing.
Three Pathway Roadblocks
Most restaurant owners think that traffic turns into sales. However, in reality, they could be making these three mistakes when planning their customer journey.
In the photo below, you can see how most restaurant owners think about traffic and sales or ordering when in reality, they’re missing all of these things in between that we can measure to see why it’s not successful.
The second mistake to avoid is that you have traffic and you have orders, but because you’re missing all of these steps, you’re probably not tracking all of these steps either.
To get great traffic into your restaurants, you have to understand and know what steps are missing and what steps are you not tracking.
Being able to track the missing steps will help you pave your way to a better customer journey.
The last one is, they’re probably not troubleshooting.
The whole point of having these steps and this tracking is that once you’re tracking each part of the customer journey, restaurant owners can now think “Hey, you know, we didn’t get enough people to step number three. This means that something’s wrong with step number two.”
Or something like “Hey people aren’t ordering. There’s probably something going on here”
Troubleshooting takes place in stages between each step that we should track and fix so that we know where the customer journey is going wrong.
Goal: Repeat Customers By Stacking
The only way a restaurant is going to fill every single seat and fill every single table is not just from new customers, but also getting their new customers to keep coming back.
For example, in month one, if a restaurant just holds a grand opening, right, they’re going to get this amount of customers.
And then in month two, if they get the same amount of new customers, but they have these previous customers coming back, then they have the new customers plus the customers coming back.
Same goes for month three and month four.
It’s going to keep stacking until they have like a whole group of customers in month 12.
Same thing is going to happen year after year.
As they get more customers, they only have a specific amount of seats and tables at their restaurant.
If they’re going to have more customers, they probably need more restaurants.
That’s when our restaurant expands and gets more locations.
Every restaurant owner, every company, every business is trying to expand, get more customers, open more locations, and this is how they do it.
And the only way they can do it is by really figuring out this Point of Sale Pathway and measuring every single step of the customer decision-making process.
To simply put it, it’s a loop of repeat customers:
- Generate traffic
- Get them to order
- Get them to come back again for more traffic
And that equals customer loyalty.
In Conclusion
Once you have perfected the troubleshooting process for your restaurant, getting new customers will be no sweat!
Have you noticed any of these mistakes in your restaurant business?
Let me know in the comments below!
