I just saw this post on Trizle and here’s how I think you can find and look after the best customers.

Mr W runs a restaurant and because he is a very astute person requests his customers to fill in a small feedback form with their details (name and address) and general comments. He uses these customer details and stores them in an Excel sheet (which can be done in any spreadsheet) for later use. Referring to Seth Godin’s post How to be remarkable (point 10), in order to keep people interested he invents new meal deal options prints them out on postcards (let us call them meal deal postcards).

These postcards are then posted to the list of customers he has recorded in the excel sheet earlier. Every time a customer calls in the restaurant, if they bring their “meal deal postcard” they get to eat the meal deal which is quite subsidised as compared to the normal prices. The waiters are supposed to make a note of these meal deal postcards (name and the postcode) on the order form for the customer.

Mr W then uses the customer (who brought their meal deal postcards) details on order forms and compares it to the list he has, to identify the regular customers and the new customers. He also does a bit of housekeeping which means if a customer has not been in the restaurant for several months their name is struck off this list. This helps in keeping the list manageable. Regular customers get even better deals which keeps them interested all the time. The customers who come back are certainly the best customers in two ways; first of all they give the place a lot of business and secondly word of mouth publicity brings more customers.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 8th, 2007 at 3:55 pm and is filed under Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.