You maybe running a small coffee shop owner or own a chain of big restaurants, one pain area you will always have is how to keep all your tables always occupied. Are there any restaurant systems that can help you achieve this?

Your business will always have this cycle where new set of customers start frequenting your restaurants and old set moves onto a different business. The secret of keeping your tables always booked lies in ensuring that this new set of customers stays with you while retaining your old set of customers. However human mind and preferences are very unpredictable. Would your customers resist change and prefer familiarity of your restaurant or would they look for greener pastures to escape boredom.

To keep your customers coming back you have to keep on reinventing your experience and there are lots of restaurant systems & software’s that can help you in this. Let’s review some of them.

Enhance customer experience:- customer experience is the single most important factor in retaining customers. Satisfied customers will not only come back for more but also increase your new customer base through word of mouth publicity. How do you harness technology to enhance customer experience? —Use technology for surveys and find out how, where and what you are doing good and keep on doing that and find out areas of improvement and improve on that. You can use surveys on your website and apps, print surveys etc.

-build a good training manual online/offline with all your best practises and customer enhancement tips to train your staff, the better trained your staff is the more happier your customers.

-use your database to personalize your relationship with your customers like sending them greetings on their birthdays and anniversaries. BTW this is a good way to increase business also, like giving discount on b’days and anniversaries when they are most likely to spend the most.

-Diners hate it when waiters take their credit card away and run it up at the register — it’s a common point for credit-card fraud. Hand them a restaurant iPad they can self-checkout on where their card doesn’t leave their sight, and they’re happy. That often-endless wait for the card and bill to return doesn’t win fans, either

-Show your location with GPS map and route from customer location to your place. This is specially good for new customers as they hate to be lost looking for a new place.

-offer free WiFi, it keeps customers engaged and keeps them coming back for more.

Get New Customers – Online reviews are the best way to use technology to get new customer. Having a strong presence on reviews website like yelp will definitely lead to a steady stream of new customers.

Retain old customers – one of the best ways to use technology to keep your customers coming back is too offer discount codes and coupons. Specially at times when your customers are more likely to spend more like on thier b’days and anniversaries etc.

These are some of the ways you can use technology in your restaurant systems that will help you ensure that your tables are always full.

Do let me know your thoughts and would really welcome more suggestions to add to this list.

If you are a restaurant owner looking to improve the efficiency of your restaurant systems then check out eDeliveryApp – Restaurant Ordering System. It has all the marketing module and customers acquisition and retention modules that you may need.