5 Reasons Why You Should Stay Connected With Your Customers as a Restaurant Owner

5 Reasons Why You Should Stay Connected With Your Customers as a Restaurant Owner

In 2019 Ryan Olohan and his wife opened Seven Scoops & Sips, a restaurant that donates a portion of its income to charity. To date, no one can tell how their local restaurant became a big competition for top restaurants in their area. But the truth was that they had more customers than they could handle. When COVID-19 was born into the world, they, like many small businesses, saw a decline in their sales.

Now, the lockdown that was imposed due to the pandemic is being lifted, yet Seven Scoops & Sips has not been able to grow their customer base back to what it was Pre-Covid. Let's look at a scenario that doesn't include social distancing and alarming death rates. What if, due to unforeseen circumstances, you had to relocate your restaurant's address. How do you ensure that you still stay connected to your loyal customers?

Honestly, it's not uncommon for restaurant owners and other small business owners to notice a decline in customer patronage. This is why business owners must endeavor to maintain customer relationships. This article will, therefore, give you reasons why you should maintain a connection with your customers and show you how to maintain that client-customer relationship via StampnGo in-app messenger

5 Reasons Why You Should Stay Connected With Your Customers as a Restaurant Owner

According to a Walker study, after the year 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator. This, therefore, heightens the necessity of staying connected with your customers. Most business owners become so focused on getting new customers that they forget how important it is to stay connected with existing customers.

To a lot of business owners, it's more important to maintain an owner-customer relationship than to attract new customers. Here are five essential reasons why you should put more effort into maintaining a good relationship with your existing customers.

1. Business success: Developing strong customer relationships leads to business success. In other words, the success of any business lies in how strong their customer patronage and loyalty are. Try not to forget that most of the time, it's the loyal customers that refer new customers to a business.

2. Serves as a guide to learning what your target market wants: Getting to know your customers helps inform your decision making towards your business. Knowing your customers helps you know the type of meals your customers enjoy, helps you know how to arrange your menu, etc. In general, it gives you access to customer-related information

3. Boosts sales: Staying Connected with your customers helps to boost sales and overall market productivity.

4. Improves customer services: Keeping in touch with your customers will help you know what your customers find satisfactory and otherwise.

5. Brings about positive customer reviews: As you know, a lot of people patronize a business only after they have seen reviews from its past customers. Yes, the quality of your goods and services have a hand in getting good reviews from your customers. But your (good) relationship with your customers also plays a vital role in ensuring great customer reviews.

Ways to Maintain Customer Relationships

1. Work on your business's first impression: The moment a new customer walks through those doors, he/she is directly or indirectly trying to compare your standards and services with other restaurants/businesses that he/she had visited. Therefore, you shouldn't just concentrate on preparing quality meals, rather, you should aim to inscribe your restaurant's name into that customer's heart.

As a restaurant owner, your main focus should be to create a wonderful atmosphere and experience for that new customer. This is something that will make him/her want to come back to you.

2. Attend to Them immediately: customers hate it when there's a delay in getting what they order. Therefore, you should always ensure that you are on time while attending to them. If that delay was inevitable, take out time and patience to explain your reasons to the customer. You can also go the extra mile by offering a free dessert to the said customer, after all everyone loves free things.

3. Respond promptly to your clients' complaints: No matter how hard you try, mistakes are bound to happen in business. All you need to do is to try to rectify them as quickly and effectively as possible. Remember that for your customers to trust and respect you, you need to prove that you're dedicated to making them happy.

4. Join a User-Friendly Loyalty App: This is by far the cheapest and most effective way to stay connected to your customers. A loyalty app is an app whose primary function is to create and keep the communication link between a business owner and his customers open. It will help you communicate with your customers and also give you a complete view of your customer’s habits, buying patterns, etc. One of the most popular, effective, and most recommended in-app messenger apps that you can use to communicate with your customers is StampnGo.

How To Stay Connected With Your Customers through the StampnGo app

StampnGo is the most interactive and user-friendly application that a restaurant owner should use to boost sales and improve customer relationships. Its main goal is to help small offline businesses (cafes, restaurants, beauty shops, etc.) to build real relationships with their customers. It has features that when used will help you get ahead of your competitors.

With this app, your customers will enjoy several rewards, benefits, and discounts for their loyalty. Most importantly, with StampnGo, you get to chat with your customers and get first-hand feedback on how they feel about your products and services.

Our innovative app also helps to encourage cashless purchasing. It allows your customers to have all their cards (prepaid cards, membership cards, stamp cards, etc.) on their phones.

Features that StampnGo in-app messages offer to your customers

1. Help to find Stamp deals and get rewards: if you aren't already into one or most popular loyalty deals, then you're lacking in one vital customer relations program. Customers feel the need to re-patronize a business when they are promised a freebie. A lot of business owners offer deals like "buy nine and get one free" to attract new and old customers. Whichever loyalty program you choose to do, you should use the StampnGo app to keep track of those deals and for transparency's sake.

2. Virtual prepaid cards: your customers can purchase virtual prepaid cards through this app. Then, they can purchase your goods and services through those virtual cards. Finally, they can reload their cards when it is empty through an online transaction (from their accounts) or other means.

3. Add Membership cards: if your business offers membership cards, then we assure you that your customers will appreciate it more if those cards are virtual. People hardly ever forget their phones, so with their membership card in the StampnGo app they are assured that their membership cards are with them always

4. Chat with your customers: unlike many customer loyalty apps, StampnGo offers a feature that will help you have direct contact with your customers. With this feature, you can check on a customer and ask why his/her orders are slower than they used to be. You can also invite a few customers for a private tasting. With the StampnGo chat feature, you can get creative in your task of keeping your customers' loyalty.

Conclusion

You and your customers can download StampnGo apps from the Android store or the Apple store. Remember that while delivering top-notch services is essential for customer patronage, you also need to organize loyalty programs to keep your existing customers. StampnGo in-app messenger should be your go-to loyalty app.