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Lots of factors influence why a guest is or isn’t loyal to your business but the greatest factor is obviously their satisfaction with the guest experience you deliver. So it goes without saying that this should be one of the most important things to measure and analyze in your business – even more so than COGS, right? Afterall, you can have the best cost containment strategies in place but if your guests are not loyal or are unhappy with the experience you deliver, it’s all meaningless because we’re all out of a job!

Again, no one ever shrank their way to greatness.

We believe it is critical and while most operators agree, most still fail to be proactive in measuring or even tracking its delivery. Enter the GuestPromoter™ Program.

When it comes to measuring the guest experience, we believe in five core principles.

  1. Operators must create a formal Voice of the Guest (VoG™) strategy and execute it religiously.
  2. Operators must include the VoG™ information into feedback efforts at all levels of the business – including all front-line staff in the FOH and BOH.
  3. Operators must include guest ideas for both strategic initiatives and tactical process improvements.
  4. Operators should define the formal processes for gathering and analyzing guest feedback.
  5. Operators should engage guests in creating a system that encourages a high level of participation.

The Key To GEM

Most operators ‘front load’ their marketing of potential and existing guests by focusing on the ‘shotgun’ approach of mass-mailing, broadcast email campaigns and other database marketing efforts, FSI’s, yellow page ads, newspaper ads, billboards, TV radio, etc… This is the typical ‘transaction based’ marketing attitude towards guests. But not many focus on ‘relationship based’ marketing that creates real, organic loyalty of guests. GuestPromoter™ helps you do just that.

We believe that real loyalty (the type where guests are ‘evangelists’ of your brand and won’t be swayed by a coupon or deep discount) comes from giving guests an emotional connection to your brand through a better guest experience.

If you can raise the level of engagement of each guest to include referring you through positive word-of-mouth, you will see long-term, consistent improvements in sales and traffic that can even help you weather economic downturns, stiff and increasing levels of competition and even your own bad judgment.

But to understand how to leverage real guest loyalty, you first have to be able to measure it.

Feature & Benefits

No one listens anymore. The guest comes in for whatever reason. Has their experience (good or bad) then leaves – usually without much fanfare or notice. Simply because it’s the nature of the process in most businesses.You have experienced this yourself, probably in most (all) places you visit.

But what if the business sat up and took notice of who their guests are and understood how important they are to their success by engaging them in a conversation about how the business could improve their ability to make you happy – every single time a guest visited? Would they come back more often? I would and I’m sure you would too. That’s the point of GuestPromoter™.

By engaging guests about more than just their level of satisfaction with a single experience, but with everything you do for them (or don’t do), you convey your understanding and concern for their happiness and long-term satisfaction with your brand. You tell them that you intend to listen and act on what their needs and desires are. That you care. This is the foundation of an emotional connection that will increase and support a much higher level of real guest loyalty than could have been achieved through coupons, discounts, point-based frequency schemes or other forms of ‘push’ marketing that are more widely used by amateur marketers who do not understand the need for ‘relationship based’ marketing over ‘transactional based’ marketing. (See The Yin and Yang of Restaurant Marketing)

Also, by engaging them with a sense of urgency (usually 36 hours or less after their experience) you can have the necessary information to make much quicker decisions that can have a tremendous impact on sales and guest loyalty. Action at the point of engagement with guests is critical in communicating to them a high level of sincerity and understanding of their importance to you and your business. This creates a much higher level of trust in what you say and do and solidifies the loyalty that guests have for your business. This in turn, makes them frequent your business more often – increasing sales and profits.

Cost Savings

  1. GuestPromoter™ allows you to ’86′ ineffective marketing efforts thus saving money on transaction and acquisition costs. It also allows you to stop ‘feeling around in the dark’ when it comes to trying to understand what guests think about you and your business.
  2. Armed with much better information about guest wants and demands can lead you to create better marketing solutions or opportunities to increase guest acceptance and loyalty to your products and services which always leads to higher sales and profits.
  3. By knowing what’s on the minds of your guests, you can also more quickly put into place, those efforts that can and should be utilized to extend your products and services to a greater number of potential guests by matching the desires and wants of existing guests with an even greater number of potential guests in your market.

Competitive Advantage

The insights found by using GuestPromoter™ can help create product, process and service improvements that help your business outperform your competition. While measurement is critical, sifting through the data to find the pieces that can help you do so is even more critical. When using these insights strategically, you’ll gain a competitive advantage, increase guest lifetime value (LTV) and ultimately boost bottom-line results. GuestPromoter™ is the best and only VoG™ program that can help you turn your data into dollars.

For other answers to your questions about GuestPromoter™ please see our FAQ page here or give us a call at 888-260-0380.