Tips for Creating Loyal Customers and Personalized Experiences
The bottom line: the customer experience can make or break your quick service restaurant business. Without happy customers, your business just wouldn’t exist. Getting and keeping customers in a crowded market can be challenging. But by elevating the customer experience, you can turn first-time customers into loyal ones that show up again and again, even bringing family and friends with them.
So let’s talk about some ways to help you stand out from your competition by improving and elevating your quick service restaurant’s customer experience.
Back to Basics: What Impacts the Customer Experience?
In order to create effective strategies, you must first understand what actually impacts the customer experience, because it’s not just food quality.
Here are some factors to consider that could impact the QSR customer experience:
- Food Quality: Above everything else, your customers come to your quick service restaurant to satisfy their hunger with a delicious meal. The quality of your ingredients and food plays a huge part in customer loyalty.
- Customer Service: How your employees serve your customers is another big impact factor. Friendly and attentive service creates a more positive experience for customers, making them much more likely to return.
- Cleanliness and Healthiness: Today’s consumers are looking for healthy food options, but this is also about how hygienic your practices are and how clean your eating areas are. Make sure your employees know proper hygienic protocol and that you are keeping your eating areas clean and healthy with regular cleaning throughout the day.
- Employee Knowledge and Training: Speaking of knowledge, it’s not just about hygienic practices, but overall knowledge of the business. Do your employees know what to do when an ingredient is out of stock? Do they know what to do when dealing with an unhappy customer? Training your employees so they feel confident in their job will mean they provide better service to your customers.
- Employee Satisfaction and Engagement: Confidence in their work is only a part of employee satisfaction and engagement. When employees have a personal level of investment in the business, it can influence how customers see your restaurant. Employees who are happy with the work they do and who are engaged with the company provide a better experience for customers, resulting in more positive reviews and word-of-mouth marketing.
- Speed: Speed is important in a quick service restaurant, so make sure you are optimizing flow in the kitchen and getting orders out in a timely manner. But remember, don’t sacrifice quality for speed; it’s a balancing act that you’ll need to work on!
- Ease of Payment: Customers love convenient payment options and it can impact their overall satisfaction with your business. Make sure that you provide different options, like self-serve kiosks and different types of card or phone wallet readers.
- The Environment: The comfort and convenience your customer can enjoy in your QSR can be the difference between those who are willing to wait patiently during busy hours and those who leave a bad review. Be sure that you offer areas to stand and wait for food or dedicated parking spaces to optimize longer drive-through waits.
4 Effective Strategies for Happier Customers
So we’ve touched on some of these strategies above, but let’s break it down a little more.
1 | The Employee Factor
Your employees are the face of your business. Effective and thorough training will ensure that they are providing the best service to your customers. Proper training can also help them feel more confident, even through dealing with a problem that crops up.
However, to really outshine your competitors, it will require going further than basic training. Remember, providing training to only new employees doesn’t cut it. Instead, offer continuing education for employees by investing in their personal and professional development and give them opportunities for growth with leadership training.
Then, take it another step further by amping up employee engagement. Staying connected with your employees will help them feel more invested in your company, but it will also mean better communication. Using a digital channel to communicate with your employees, work out scheduling, and more can help keep your employees engaged and happy with their job.
2 | Introduce Loyalty Rewards
Some national franchises already offer this to customers, but if your QSR doesn’t consider setting up a customer loyalty reward program. This is a simple way to incentivize customers to return again and again to get a reward! Bonus: make it digital so that customers can easily track their reward progress right on their phone.
3 | Offer a 5-Sense Experience
Remember, we don’t just eat with our mouths; our other senses are included in the entire experience. When customers enter your quick service restaurant, provide them with a pleasant experience that engages their sight, sound, and taste. Clean and pleasant interiors with soft music and light can set the mood for a fun and engaging eating experience.
4 | The Power of Emotion
Your customers are more than just a number and want to be treated as such. Your customers are looking not just for good food, but to feel valued, respected, and wanted. Don’t just serve your customer, rather, offer a notable experience that lets them feel like they are more than just a customer in line. Plus, be sure to meet complaints with empathy. Showing the human side of your business will provide a better overall experience.
QSRSoft and the Customer Experience
Are you looking for ways to keep your employees engaged and well informed? Are you looking for a digital way to manage your inventory? QSRSoft can help you with that and more! Our powerful solutions offer employee scheduling, a smart time clock, real-time data, custom alerts for important metrics, inventory flow, and more. Schedule a demo today to learn how our solutions can help you improve your QSR customer experience.