In today’s new consumption scenarios, user touchpoints, user decisions, and user scenarios are the three most critical points.
Among them, the user touch point is the foundation of everything. It is no exaggeration to say that marketing cannot be established without touchpoints!
1. What is a touchpoint?
What exactly is a customer touchpoint? It is something that can be felt directly or indirectly by the customer. Broadly speaking, the types of touchpoints can be divided into the following three categories.
Physical touchpoints. For example, physical stores, such as restaurant menus, tableware, space displays, etc., usually can be measured and unified by a fixed standard.
Spiritual touchpoints. This type of touchpoint is the richest in scope, from the simplest music, and system background information, to more complex AI, VR, etc., including visual, auditory, etc., to influence the user’s feelings. This type of touchpoint does not have a specific physical object, so it is difficult to be unified in terms of measurement criteria.
Interpersonal touchpoints. As the name suggests, it is mainly through interpersonal interaction to achieve the purpose of contacting customers. For example, the staff’s service in physical stores, online product recommendations, and so on. The effectiveness of these touchpoints depends on a large extent the initiative of people. Operators need to realize that the touchpoint is the point where a restaurant or product comes into direct contact with the customer, and therefore the customer touchpoint is the basis of all marketing. If a restaurant is to do well, it must pay attention to the development of a customer touchpoint strategy, which will directly determine the success or failure of operations and marketing.
2. Touchpoint marketing in the F&B industry
(Image Credit-Google)
(1) Online Store
Key point: aesthetic display
When a customer sees a restaurant on an online platform, the most important factor that influences the consumer decision, apart from the rating, is the image of the restaurant. An attractive shop profile photo, sophisticated pictures of the dishes, and a clean interior environment will naturally make customers want to come to the restaurant.
Remember, in an era where consumption levels are escalating, beauty is also a form of productivity.
(2) Offline Stores
Key point: simple & direct
As with the online store, the first touchpoint of an offline store is the shop front. The ability to make customers see and remember the restaurant is the key to increasing customer conversion.
If a customer passes by a restaurant but hesitates to come in, it is likely that the customer does not know what to eat or how much a meal will cost through the photos on display. This is a cost of choice, and it is not the price that is the key factor but the predictability of the restaurant for the customer.
In this fragmentation era, customers have a limited attention span, so only restaurants with simple and direct shop front can easily be remembered.
(3) Greetings
Key point: enthusiasm & affinity
The greeters in a restaurant don’t have to be good-looking or fit, but they do have to be approachable.
(4) Queuing
Key point: good customer experience
With the development of the internet, consumers can take a number and check the progress of the queue online, which greatly enhances the customer’s experience when queuing. But apart from those just mentioned, what else can restaurants do to better the queuing session?
①Show the restaurant features. Invite customers to visit the transparent kitchen to increase publicity efforts.
② Organize customers to learn about the health aspects of dining. In the epidemic era, customers are more concerned about their health. Therefore, restaurants can make an animation in the carousel to show their hygiene management process to customers, which can enhance customers’ trust in the restaurant to a certain extent.
(5) Interior environment
Key points: comfortable & aesthetic
Those popular restaurants have influenced the F&B industry to realize the importance of the dining environment. Sometimes the restaurant’s environment even becomes the only reason for consumers’ choice. Every consumption is essentially an expression of customers’ own values, and a good restaurant environment will make customers unable to resist sharing it.
(6) Hand washing
Key points: convenience & cleanliness
Details make the difference, and for restaurants, the details are hidden behind how customers can wash their hands. Most customers may wash their hands more often than they go to the toilet, but few restaurants have a dedicated area only for hand washing.
Washing hands before a meal is a basic customer need, and a good restaurant should have a dedicated area at the entrance for washing hands as soon as customers enter.
After the epidemic, consumers are more aware of their safety and will take hand washing more seriously. If the restaurant does not have a dedicated area for hand washing, they should at least prepare hand sanitizers for customers’ usage.
(7) Transparent kitchen
(Image Credit-Google)
Key point: clean & bright
Few restaurants offer to show customers their kitchen, but when a restaurant shows their transparent kitchen, they are actually ensuring the customers of their food’s cleanliness and hygiene.
(8) Tableware
Key point: clean & secure
After customers sit down, their first instinct is to see if the table and cutlery are clean. At this point, what counts as a good experience?
Not only should the table be clean, but the cutlery should also be warm. Customers don’t specifically look to see if there is a disinfection cabinet in the restaurants, but if the cutlery is warm, it must have been disinfected, giving customers more peace of mind.
(9) Ordering
Key points: speed & dish recommendations
Compared to the traditional POS system, which only addresses efficiency, the new generation of POS systems connects the customer to the restaurant and the platform. Customers can use QR codes to place orders and checkout online directly without leaving their seats, greatly saving the workload of waiters.
However, restaurants should also consider whether the ordering method is suitable for their standards. For example, in the case of high-end banqueting restaurants, most of them take service as a selling point and cannot affect the user experience in order to reduce costs.
(10) Serving
Key points: fast & keep temperature
①Consistent frequency of serving. A speed of serving that satisfies customers should be that each dish is served at the same time interval. Restaurants that want to achieve this need a strong supply chain to support them, to ensure that signature dishes can be prepared in advance, saving the kitchen some processing time.
②Plates are warm. A decreasing temperature of a dish can also affect the taste of the customer’s meal. Therefore, whether a dish is qualified or not, the first thing to look at is the temperature of the dish.
③Plate presentation. A good-looking plate can influence the customers to take photos and share them.
④Dishes introduction. The serving session is the best time to introduce the product. A good introduction to the dish is both respectful and deepens the customer’s memory of the dish.
(11) Add an extra serving
Key point: fast
Restaurants that want to be the first to handle a customer’s request for an additional dish need to choose a suitable POS system.
(12) Staple food
Key point: quality & free
The less valuable and unimportant something is, the more memorable it is to the customer. As living standards improve, many consumers go to restaurants to only order the dishes and not the staple food, which leads many restaurants to pay less attention to the staples.
The more this happens, the more important it is for restaurants to offer high-quality staples and give them away for free. When good taste is combined with a free gift, customers are sure to have a deep impression of your restaurant and become regular customers.
(Image Credit-Google)
(13) Tissues
Key points: quality & free
The quality of the tissues in the restaurants should be given importance. This is because health-related products are the ones that boost customers’ trust the most. For something like tissues, which everyone needs, restaurants either choose not to offer them or if they do, they must offer the best quality.
(14) Checkout
Key point: fast
The biggest demand during checkout is speed. With code ordering and mobile payment, users can place their order and checkout while sitting at their seats, which is fast and saves the cashier’s time.
(15) Customer service
Key point: attitude over action
The handling of customer complaints is a basic skill in the service industry and is essentially a test of communication skills.
① Timely handling. Timeliness not only means being the first to deal with the problem but also contains a second layer of meaning: giving the waiter or waitress sufficient authority. If the waiter has the right to charge the food for free or cancel the order, the user’s experience will not be too bad.
② No shirking of responsibility and no arguments. The customer’s expectation of complaint handling is often more attitude than action. So when it comes to resolving customer complaints, if the waiter and the customers get into an argument or the restaurant shirks its responsibility, it will inevitably deepen the conflict between the customer and the restaurant.
(16) Mouth rinse
Key point: experience upgrade
Many restaurants and hotels put mints or chewing gum at the front desk for customers to rid of bad breath after meal consumption. It’s an immediate need to rid of bad breath after a meal, but it’s also not suitable to have sweet candy after eating.
(17) Reply to comments
Key point: timely & authentic
Whether it’s a positive or negative review, restaurants need to respond to them especially those that have just opened. At the same time, responding to customer reviews in a timely manner will allow the restaurants to better understand the needs of customers and to improve further.
(18) Recommendation
Key point: clear memory points
Every restaurant has to keep in mind how would the customers describe the restaurant if they thought of it again or recommend it to other friends.
Summary
The internet era has further facilitated the spread of word-of-mouth, which requires every restaurant to be memorable to its customers, otherwise, it is likely that the restaurant will be replaced by another.
Whether it is to increase the customer’s experience, address shortcomings raised by customers, add share-oriented customer incentives, etc., all these need to be achieved through customer touchpoints.
Therefore, it’s no exaggeration to say that a restaurant’s ability to make the most of its customer touchpoints is the key to marketing!