• Your menu has to be balanced and full of staples that keep patrons coming back for more.
• Your pricing has to be perfectly calibrated for price/value yet also deliver the margins you need to operate profitably.
• Your suppliers need to come through with the freshest, highest quality goods.
• And your digital strategy matters as much as ever in an era of expanding mobile delivery options.

But when it comes to crafting loyalty, there’s one factor that often gets skipped over, and that’s a shame, because it happens to be the most important one: customer experience.

Customer experience is the thread that holds your entire business together. It’s the sum total of how your   customer “think” and “feels” as a result of their dining experiences with you. Are you greeted in at timely manner at the door? Are your dining experiences just OK or Instagram-worthy ?

Great customer experiences are your ultimate insurance policy, especially in unpredictable times like these. Great experience can keep tables full, even when you have a bad night or menu prices have to rise. And nothing can sour customer loyalty—and cause customers to silently defect—quite as fast as a terrible customer experience.

3 ways to measure and improve CX

Okay, so now you know about CX and its importance, but how can you improve it? Here’s 3 easy things you can start now to measure and improve CX in your restaurant:

1) Set Up A Simple Voice of Customer Program

You don’t need fancy software to start measuring Customer Experience. It’s as straightforward as setting up an ongoing Voice of Customer survey after each meal you serve. Hexa can help you out with this. We’ve got simple yet powerful technology that can send out post-meal surveys with standard questions measuring the heart of the experience and let patrons speak their own minds.

2) Prove You’re Listening By Taking Action

Listening is a great start, but analysing responses and taking action is where the real power lives. That’s where Hexia comes in: we use artificial intelligence to identify areas for improvement you can prioritise each month. We’ll recommend changes to make to take your CX capabilities to the next level.

3) Do It Right By Doing It Continuously

In Step 1, you started listening. In Step 2, you took action. Now you close the loop and unlock the full power of continuous improvement! Listening and taking action sends a strong signal to your patrons, but what if the problem recurs? Like all great habits, great CX takes dedication and consistency to really get it right.