Are you killing yourself trying to figure out how to “wow” your customers? Do you spend your time trying to “top” the last greatest thing you did for your customers? Be careful, you might be working your way out of business. Now, don’t get me wrong, always striving to do better with your service or offerings is definitely attractive to your customers. I am not trying to suggest you don’t work on improving what you provide your customers. What I am trying to say is that you need to make sure you don’t lose sight of what attracted your customer’s in the first place. Some restaurant owners change the ingredients of a popular dish because they think the new ingredients are better. They lost sight of what their customer’s loved about the dish and instead, focused on the new recipe or “Bells and Whistles” when there was nothing wrong with the old or original recipe. As a result, they had to deal with a huge backlash from their customers. The restaurant owner had to re-invent the old and made it special again for their customers, letting them know they were heard and they would continue to meet their request.
Customer’s will appreciate you continuing to provide them with the best service/products possible and will welcome “new” offerings along the way, but they still want reliability, dependability and consistency of what they have come to expect from your business. If you don’t provide them with their basic needs and wants, they will look elsewhere for it.
We get comfortable with what we know and we don’t like to change too quickly so give your customer’s the same basic offerings/service they have come to know and love and gradually introduce them to new things without compromising your originality that they are comfortable with. So before you start menu engineering it is prudent to consider these factors. Your Point of sale business intelligence reports can help guide you in these decisions.
You don’t have to always try to out-do yourself, remember, you earned customers with a great idea or service and If you continue to provide your basic service/product that brought your clients to you in the first place they will continue to be loyal and keep coming back for more.
