CRM for Restaurants: Grow Your Customer Base and Loyalty

Nowadays, the restaurants are not only under the constant pressure to make sales, but also to enhance them. The CEO and Co-Founder of FiveStars, Victor Ho, states that 60% of restaurant’ customers are less likely to come back. So, it is essential to find a right solution to manage the critical aspects of making the sale: clients and costs. That’s where CRM for restaurants comes in. Before diving deep into the essence of restaurant's CRM initiative, let's find out the key benefits of the platform:

• developing and creating the customer base
• offering specials for the clients on the personal occasions like birthdays
• keeping a list of the guests with contacts data, favorite dishes or drinks
• providing the discounts for the regular diners
• using email to conduct promotions
• collecting and analyzing the feedback

So, CRM for restaurants helps you solicit the information about prospects, create a database with these details, and use them to offer the individualized customer service.

3 Essential Ways to Succeed with Restaurant CRM

While the idea of the CRM and hospitality is not new, some restaurants owners, managers, wait staff still rely on their memory or notes to build the successful client experience and loyalty. Let’s investigate how CRM can make this process faster, scalable and interactive to create the more personal guest relationships:

#1 Enlarge the Customer Base

The core of any CRM system is data, CRM for restaurants help you gather the information about the customers starting from the contact details, the frequency of visits to preferences of meals. You can categorize the clients as your existing or potential ones, the regulars or one-time diners. Besides, the platform helps find out what customers haven’t visited your place for a while.

One of the main advantages of obtaining CRM for restaurants is providing the valuable reports and analysis. For example you may indicate the most and least popular menu dishes or determine the busiest days and the reasons why. This becomes a basis for the communication with the clients helping you track the trend and feeds for the marketing campaigns.

#2 Create the Strategic Marketing

Once you have a complete database, marketing is your next logical step. CRM for restaurants can provide the insights to start creating the promotional campaigns. Take advantage of the solution to:

• Segment and target the specific groups of prospects for seniors, adults, students or kids
• Use the platform to create the customized loyalty programs based on the menu habits
• Send discounts with adding value to the customer. For instance: a coupon that a client can redeem on the next visit.

#3 Build a Tasty Menu

Food is one of the key aspects of the successful restaurant strategy, the items available on the menu should match the customer's meals preferences. Note: despite a high food quality, there are the dishes that sells both extremely well and poorly. CRM for the restaurants can help you generate the sales data on the items in various ways, like:

• Popular and highly profitable (keep in the menu)
• Profitable but unpopular (substitute some ingredients with cheaper alternative, but comprise the taste and quality)  
• Popular but unprofitable (try to use more aggressive marketing)
• Unpopular and useless (scrap from the meals’ card)

Bottom Line

As you can see, CRM for restaurants is a valuable asset to generate more business. Take the information above into consideration to know your guests better, manage the successful interactions with them and shape the future offerings based on purchasing trends. In case you are looking for more advanced industry-specific CRM and the tool to complete the process securely, consider an automated migration service Trujay. Don’t wait up, try a free Demo Migration right now!