How to Get Repeat Restaurant Customers

Knowing how to get repeat restaurant customers can benefit your restaurant immensely. While getting customers through the door isn’t easy, making them regular customers is the real challenge. Despite the challenge of it, making first-time customers repeat customers is enormously beneficial. Repeat customers spend more at your business and can bring new customers to it. As far as marketing strategy goes, you can’t do much better.

But how do you get repeat customers? Here are some things you can do to make customers want to return:

Repeat Restaurant Customers Return for Great Food and Excellent Service 

The only reason any customer ever returns to a restaurant is if they left satisfied their last visit. That satisfaction is dependent on two variables: food and service. There are no gimmicks or marketing ploys that can compensate for bad food or service. 

Dining out is an experience based in trust. A customer trusts that acceptable levels of hygiene and consideration are present at their eatery of choice. Even a negative interaction with the server can set the stage for distrust of your whole establishment. If they have a negative food experience or interaction they interpret as violating that trust, their likelihood of returning plummets.  

A marketing campaign may bring them there the first time, but it’s the actual service that will bring them back.  

Repeat Restaurant Customers Return for a Defined Experience

If you want your customers to come back, you will have to give them a reason to remember your restaurant. Consider your own dinner-deciding procedure. When thinking of where to go, you likely ask yourself: 

• What am I feeling like? 

• How much am I willing to spend? 

• How far am I willing to travel? 

• How was my experience last time? 

• Can I get that experience anywhere else?

As a restaurant looking to retain return customers, you want your establishment to satisfy as many of those questions as possible. Some, like travel and price, are predetermined in this equation. What you have control over are the last two: previous experience, and experience uniqueness. We know the value of positive previous experiences, but what about experience uniqueness? 

Crafting a Unique Restaurant Experience To Get Return Customers

Making a unique experience for return customers doesn’t require an overhaul of your dining room to fit a kitschy theme. After all, cat-cafes aren’t right for everybody. What’s needed is a memorable uniqueness of some nature. A reason for customers to seek your business out specifically; something they’ll have trouble finding elsewhere.

It could be as basic as your restaurant’s name, logo, slogan, or more substantial as a food/service-centered difference. For example, signature dishes, unique ingredient usage, unique atmosphere, local food sourcing, publicized environmental stewardship, or pet-friendly dining. 

The possibilities are only limited by your willingness to explore uniqueness. If you find one that resonates with your customers, build off of it and it will become yours. 

Make Your Repeat Customer’s Decision to Come Back Easy 

Customers remember how you make them feel. What you want is for them to feel safe and cared for while at your business. Most of all, you want them to feel like they can trust you and the people that represent your brand, your employees. The right uniforms play a big role in generating a positive perception of your business.

Get Repeat Restaurant Customers With Consistent Cleanliness

Your facility plays an important role in making your customers feel good about doing business with you. No one wants to go back to a business space that looks and smells dirty. Customers notice everything about a restaurant, especially on their first visit, and especially its cleanliness. 

Dirty floors, handprints and watermarks on the windows, dirty or poor quality linens, or stained urinals and toilets, yellowing tile grout, missing toilet paper and paper towels, and smelly restrooms – will turn away any customer. That’s true no matter how good the appetizers are.

To combat these customer-experience killers, Republic Master Chef has just the materials you need. From professional tablecloth and linen rentals, industry-geared facility service materials, or high-quality restroom products, RMC is here to help. 

Republic Master Chefs Has Your Needs Covered

If you want to get repeat customers, you need a partner who can make sure your business always looks its best. Republic Master Chefs can help! Call us today at (800) 640-2433 so we can show you your options and how we can help boost your brand.