Page 41 - foodservice magazine Feb 2019

MANAGEMENT
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The whole point here is not to lose regular customers and to increase your customer base, rather than spending money on marketing to replace customers whose loyalty you have since lost. That’s like tearing up $100 bills.
When I started my consulting and training business 33 years ago I found there were no small companies prepared to perform surveys on individual restaurants, so we assembled our own mystery-shopper teams and sent them out to regularly survey our clients.
Organising the surveyors was a pain in the arse and proved to not be profitable, but we kept doing it for a number
of years because we needed regular surveys to support the development of our contract clients.
These days perception surveys are available from a number of companies and
we insist our clients do them regularly, because the proof
is in the pudding. The clients who take the process seriously and follow up to eliminate negative perceptions have
a measurably higher rate of growth in customer numbers and customer average spend. It’s been proven many
times over.
Yet we still have clients who fight tooth and nail to avoid
what they see as an “unnecessary cost”, rather than a valuable investment.
The point here is not to
lose regular customers and to increase your customer base, rather than spending money on marketing to replace customers whose loyalty you have since lost. That’s like tearing up $100 bills.
If you stop losing customers by delivering consistent positive perception, you will find word- of-mouth will quickly overtake paid advertising as your primary marketing tool. The very best restaurants I deal with spend very little on marketing, yet are mostly full.