Implement the Net Promoter Score® Philosophy into your Restaurant

Willingness to return can be an effective tool for measuring customer retention at your restaurant. However, successful restaurants need more than loyalty, they need numbers and a vast rotation of patrons to ensure a thriving business. To measure that long-term success, you must look beyond retention and visit satisfaction, as ultimately it is the customers’ recommendation that will carry your business forward. An organization can measure a customer’s willingness to recommend the restaurant to their friends or family by instituting a Net Promoter Score® (NPS) survey methodology in parallel with your existing customer feedback infrastructure. NPS® can be a vital resource to restaurants, because it gives a numerical score that is easy for employees to understand, reduces the necessary effort for a customer to submit their review, and it can serve as a centralizing philosophy that leads to more accountability and staff engagement.

Recommendations play a huge role in the restaurant industry because eating out is a collective experience. This communal aspect of going out to eat has expanded even more so than before, because people can recommend a brand to their network instantaneously via social media. People want to share the things and places they love with the people they love, and social media has made this recommendation process more frequent and easier to digest. By focusing your employees on providing a value and service that encourages recommendations and high NPS® scores, you are positioning your brand to achieve consistent growth and better customer relationships. Rather than trying to attract as many new customers as possible, creating a strategy revolving around providing an excellent atmosphere, service and product to existing customers will make these already paying customers happy and excited to return, as well as motivating them to do the crux of your marketing for you.

Brands that have treated NPS® as an organizational philosophy instead of just a metric have proven to be Customer Experience leaders within their respective industries. Titans like Apple, Enterprise and Southwest Airlines are just a few examples of leading brands that centralized their existing Customer Experience, as well as their company culture around the NPS® metric. Restaurants can implement this NPS®-driven approach in several different ways. You can granulize the approach to analyze specific menu items, meals, wait staff, promotional deals, or even just the restaurant experience in general. This will help determine both weaknesses and strengths within the existing customer journey, as well as measuring and analyzing employee performance.

Restaurants are in a unique position to benefit from an NPS®-based philosophy because it is an industry that is dependent on user reviews. Consumers are now programmed to search for the perfect restaurant for them at that specific moment, and as a result people will scour online reviews before selecting a new restaurant or solely sticking to places they have been before. Additionally, if you provide a great dining atmosphere and service, people will be very likely to share that with their friends so they can all share in this collective experience. A well-designed NPS® program can grant your restaurant the ability to effectively measure, analyze and improve upon the existing Customer Experience. This approach can be especially helpful for a national brand with many locations because it can contribute to ensuring a consistent brand experience across the different individual restaurants. Utilize NPS® as a centralizing philosophy and build a more consistent, clearer, and value-driven Customer Experience.

Net Promoter, Net Promoter System, Net Promoter Score, NPS and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Fred Reichheld and Satmetrix Systems, Inc.

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