Customer engagement refers to your interactions with your customers and their satisfaction during each stage of these interactions. Customer engagement begins with the first contact with a restaurant and extends beyond the point of purchase to create ongoing interactions.

These ongoing interactions with your brand mean that your customers are interacting with you. Engagement means customers are reading and interacting with your content whether on blogs, social media, or your website.

 Customer interaction with your restaurant is crucial to creating an emotional bond with your customers when they are not purchasing or consuming your products.  This will lead them to choose your restaurant whenever they have to make a decision regarding choosing a restaurant.

Customer engagement begins with face-to-face interaction but goes beyond that. In this article, let us learn about ways to create customer interaction:

 1- Collect feedback and create a dialogue:

Obviously, you can’t please everyone, but gathering feedback is essential to identifying and resolving problems.

You can easily lose an unhappy customer without identifying the reason, so asking for feedback helps you discover and fix the problem before you lose your customers.

FlexSurv is a digital platform linked directly to your POS and CRM software that gives your customers the opportunity to provide you with their honest and transparent feedback in a very simple way.

With this platform, you will never guess why you are losing customers or what your customers’ preferences are.  This tool gives you accurate data to help you in your decision-making process and future strategies.

2- Establishing a loyalty and rewards program:

Customers increase their business by 35% if they have an attractive loyalty card program and recommend your restaurant to their friends and family proving that loyalty programs are effective. Customers with loyalty programs also increase the frequency of their visits to collect more points or rewards.

 So, creating a loyalty or rewards program increases customer retention and engagement because it is a powerful communication tool.

But how is it done?

Participation in the rewards program requires information and data that is maintained in the customer management program.  This data enables you to send your customers emails about their latest rewards and updates about the redemption system as well as personalized text messages on their birthdays and special occasions to enhance your interactions and create a strong bond with them.

3- Interaction on social media:

Build your relationship with your customers using social media.  It is the best engagement tool to keep them updated with your news and offers.  It’s also your way of communicating your brand to them.

Keep them engaged with games, questions, menu updates and flyers at all occasions, and ask them for their opinion on different dishes and especially new dishes.

Increased social media engagement leads to increased loyalty, especially for millennials who rely on it for decision making.  Interactions with your posts, tagging you in their stories, and engagement with your stories keep you in your customer’s mind.

4- Engage customers using email:

Email marketing is a simple but effective way to communicate with your customers and can be done publicly to inform them of any event or change or in a personalized way for customers on their birthday for example or to inform them of news of their loyalty programme.

Allow guests to sign up for your newsletter to receive emails on a regular basis as long as the content is good or the news is interesting so that it does not end up being deleted by customers.

Customer engagement gives a competitive advantage over other restaurants if handled correctly.  It’s not something you do once. Customer engagement requires dedication and commitment to creating the best experience for them.