Do This One Thing and Get Them In Your Door and Keep Them Coming Back
Ever find yourself spending a lot of time trying to understand why your competition gets all the foot traffic and you don’t?
Get frustrated of not getting customers through the door in spite of spending a lot of time and money on social media and advertisements?
Have you taken the time to implement well thought out improvements to your menu, price, and signage and still see no results?
I was at dinner at my favorite burger joint where there’s an amazing turkey burger and was sad to hear they’re looking to move to a different part of town. The owners were hunting for another location.
Why? Because the restaurants across the street were pulling in the foot traffic and despite having equally if not better food, value for money, equal parking, and comparable ambiance– the place just wasn’t getting the numbers they wanted.
Sometimes we tend to blame the lack of customers, sales, and profits on something like a bad location but WHAT IF that’s not the real problem?
So how do we identify the REAL problem here?
By making use of the collective intelligence of your existing customers.
In this case, they are going to help you understand exactly what you need to do to pull in the large majority of foot traffic passing your restaurant and more specifically what you need to do to keep them coming back. I call this the Eliminate Your Choke Point (EYPC) Method.
By implementing the EYCP Method, you will see the number of repeat customers double within a few months. Because when you give your customers what they want, they will keep coming back and spreading the good word, online and offline.
How do you make use of the collective intelligence of your customers?
Through a smart customer feedback system. Pay attention, this is DIFFERENT than your current feedback system.
Begin with dumping the usual standard ‘how do you rate our service questionnaire’. And start with deciding the right questions. A prime example would be to ask – What do I do to bring you back for lunch?
What you want to do here is identify a single trend. 
Take hundreds of feedbacks in a short span of time. Accumulate them together and you will notice, a majority of customers have the same feedback.
I’ll give you a personal example. One of my pizza kiosks located within a cinema with the highest foot traffic in the city just wasn’t getting the numbers I projected. After taking and analyzing 300 feedbacks in a single month, the single most common trend (75% of my customers were saying) was that the pizza was being delivered to the seat warm, and not piping hot as they would like it. I resolved this immediately through a number of ways and my sales shot up. Much more than I had projected!
It boiled down to trying an old technique in a whole different way, asking the right questions consistently and taking the one action to make all the difference. So don’t jump the gun on relocating or closing just yet. Try the Eliminate Your Choke Point (EYPC) Method.
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