Increasing Guest Frequency in Restaurants

For the un-initiated, visit frequency of a guest is the number of times a guest visits a restaurant in the period. It is an important driver of sales, if not the most. So the big question:

How can you drive guest frequency in your restaurant?

To increase visit frequency, it is important to understand how guests perceive you and why they are or aren’t coming in as regularly as you would like. What makes a guest visit and continue to revisit the restaurant is the overall experience he/she gets. Experience can mean different things to different people but is mostly a combination of:

• Taste/Menu
• Perceived Value (Price)
• Service
• Ambience/Atmosphere

Identifying/Understanding what drives a particular guest to revisit is not an easy task for sure. The guest doesn’t explicitly talk about their experience (at least not all of them), however guests still tell us this through:

• Their orders
  • What are they ordering?
  • When are they ordering?
  • How are they ordering?
  • How much are they ordering?
• Their in-store behavior
  • What do they do in the restaurant/on the website/on the app
• What are they saying in
  • Surveys
  • Feedback
  • Social media

It is very important to leverage data from all these sources to understand the guest and personalize the experience based on what you know about him/her. You can do this through:

• Guest Segmentation

Segment guests into actionable groups based on purchase behavior, taste etc. and leverage insights about segments to design unique marketing campaigns that influence loyalty and frequency of visits.

• Digital Engagement

Drive conversion on your web and mobile channels by understanding behavior, preferences and content engagement on those channels.

• Real Time engagement

Sense and respond to specific guest events at POS, ecommerce and mobile apps with relevant, timely messages.

• Feedback Insights

Analyze feedback, survey, social data to get insights about guest experience which can then be used to engage with guests appropriately. There is so much you can learn from the actions and achieve the optimal level of personalization for your guests but it’s an uphill battle without the right tools. I recommend you check out what Manthan is doing in this area.  They have some really cool success stories in this case study and offer further tips for your restaurant in this data sheet.