Richard Dirstein, EVP, Creative & Innovation, discusses how you can use gamification in your restaurant to help drive the customer experience.
Transcript
Richard Dirstein. So, how can you leverage gamification to drive the customer experience within your restaurant? Gamification’s a great tool, and it works on so many levels. It is a great tool for reducing anxiety in customers’ wait time, whether that’s in the front lobby area waiting to get a seat, or once they’ve ordered food and waiting for that food to arrive at their table. They’re a captive audience, so not only are you able to drive the brand into them, and allow them to do that in a fun way, but it also helps reduce that anxiety, and that pain, around that perceived wait time.
When done right, it’s a great tool for soliciting and educating the customer not only on the product, but soliciting that information from them. Things can be gleaned such as preferred day part, choice in terms of how they like to be served, or, you know, where they’d like to be served. And giving insights around opportunities in terms of changing that customer experience, and delivering on another aspect that you may not be doing right now. And then also, finally, it’s a great tool to engage the customer while they’re outside of your restaurant.
Gamification can be used to reconnect customers with the brand to start setting them up for their next visit, and driving the customers back into your restaurant. And a great example of this is the Pokémon phenomenon of last year, where companies were able to help geotag themselves within the game environment to drive customers there. Once they’re there at the restaurant, they were able to collect unique Pokémon characters, level up certain bonuses within the game that helped really make a lot of these restaurants sticky, and drive traffic to them.
So, again, the opportunity’s there. How are you engaging your customers in that time? How are you capitalizing on gamification, especially on our own mobile devices, to really bring them back in and create a real shareable experience within your restaurant?
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