Many restaurants and coffee shops focus mainly on increasing sales and the customers’ dining experience, giving less consideration to the importance of making sure that their customers remain their customers. Moreover, most owners and operators do not have an accurate way to measure their customer churn rate and keep it in check.
Customer churn rate, also known as customer attrition, refers to the overall percentage of customers who have decided to stop doing business with you. The best-case scenario for any business is to have a 0% churn rate. But this is simply not realistic – any business will experience natural attrition. There are ways, however, to keep your customer churn rate as low as possible.
Remind Your Customers You Are Giving Them the Best Product
Your customers have plenty of options, no matter your industry. There is a fair chance that you're not the only restaurant or retailer that can give them what they want, so don't take your customers for granted or fail to recognize that there's competition for your customers and their dollars.
Considering this, whenever you engage with your customers, make sure to remind them of the quality you offer with your product. You don't have to stuff every blog post or social media post with promotional fodder, but you do want to remind your customers that any new or recent feature you are offering provides a sense of value for them. Also, be sure to thank your customers or clients for the chance to present your product or service to them – it will make them feel valued. As a result, should they have a negative experience with a rival company, they'll likely come back to you and your brand.
React Swiftly to PR Mistakes and Bad Decisions
This might be easier said than done. Odds are that you won't know you've made a bad decision until it has had a significant impact against your company. In this case, it's all about how you manage the issue. The fact is that bad PR is unavoidable for most companies if they are successful and grow big enough.
A good example of a PR blunder was when Netflix increased their prices. Netflix thought it would be a good idea to split their streaming service from their DVD delivery service and raise the prices on both. Their customers did not react well, and there was significant backlash. As a result, it's very likely that Netflix lost some customers they may never get back.
Sometimes bad PR can be the result of a system crash, computer bugs, or flaws in the business model. Two examples are the Dropbox password debacle and the negative press regarding Airbnb. In these cases, it was the job of the company, and more specifically the CEO to find a way to manage each disaster quickly and restore brand confidence.
Understand and Fortify Your Weaknesses
Are you aware of why people might not want to dine at your restaurant or shop at your store? Are you aware of what your company frequently falls short on? In most cases, deciding that your business is flawless is a massive mistake. In this case, you have failed to really listen to your customers.
Every business has its weaknesses, and you need to know yours intimately. Also, you need to know how to fix these weaknesses quickly and how to keep them from turn into bigger problems. There are many cases of companies that failed to see a weakness coming that lost significant amounts of revenue as a result. What you need to remember is that those who try to take your customers - essentially robbing you of revenue - are trying to become the market leader by taking advantage of your weaknesses. These are your competitors, and you need to stay on top of your shortcomings to make sure they don't capitalize on your faults.
An excellent way to identify your weaknesses is setting up an effective system for collecting customer reviews.
Deliver on Your Promises
Customers will become loyal to your eatery or your product because you have provided them with a unique advantage over your competition that they can't find elsewhere. However, if you neglect your efforts to keep promises, your customers will leave you. If Disneyland weren't the happiest place on earth, there'd be no repeat visitors. If Apple phones weren't so easy to handle people would stop buying them.
The same goes for Amazon, if they suddenly failed at prompt deliveries or at having a massive stock of goods, they would lose their loyal customer. People rely on the promises companies make regarding their brands. It is essential to the integrity and profitability of your brand, as well as to lower your customer churn rate as much as possible, that you keep your promises.
Gaining Insights from Traffic Analytics
Using a WiFi marketing & customer intelligence hub, like Bloom Intelligence, you can determine who makes up your audience of loyal visitors. You can also account for the length of time users visit and how they're behavior at your location changes over time. With this data, you're able to get a much deeper understanding of your customers and create targeted campaigns to ensure they remain loyal to your business.
Bloom also uses intelligent algorithm sets to monitor each customer’s frequency distribution, individually and as a whole, to understand and accurately define your customer churn rate in real time. By analyzing individual customer frequency, Bloom can determine when a customer is at-risk of churning or has churned. Then you can use the automated marketing suite of tools to send triggered messages to your at-risk and churned customers persuading them to come back.
In most cases, a high customer churn rate comes down to neutral or poor customer experiences. While you can persuade customers to give you another chance, you will still need to take the tips above into account to help keep customers from churning in the first place, and to cement their loyalty when they give your business another chance.
For info on how to reduce your customer churn rate using Bloom, click on the banner below!
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