With today’s easy communication, connectivity and engagement, restaurant and retail businesses can now offer their customers unique and free services that would not have been possible in the past. For example: “Text For Your Coat – Coat Check Valet Service.” With the cold weather and holidays approaching, your customer’s coats and cumbersome packages can be a real nuisance. Why not offer a free coat/package delivery service to free up the hands of retail customers to shop or deliver right to the table of restaurant customers when they are ready to leave instead of waiting on long lines after their meal has been paid for? In both instances, you not only provide a much appreciated service but collect your customers valuable contact information at the same time. Customers simply text when they are ready for their coats. Your employee simply brings the items right to the customer’s table or department of your retail store when they are ready to leave.
Especially helpful in restaurants, where the reality of having to wait an additional 10-15 minutes for one’s belongings in crowded vestibules is the considered normal, customers will happily embrace the convenience of this new service even if it means they may be receiving future texts from your business.
“Shopping-cart” retail stores could offer customers the additional, free, time saving service of having their carts “Pre-populated” with favorite or bulky items for future visits. Your employees simply add your customer’s favorite, everyday, heavy, hard to reach or cumbersome items to the customer’s carts ahead of time. Moms will love you for the time saving amenity of having diapers, formula, toilet tissue and water alone already in a cart when they arrive! Just have an area where carts are lined up and organized in alpha order and your new free service will take off like wildfire when new customers see the time saving amenity.
There are so many ways to enhance your customer’s experiences with readily available, free, technology today. Buying smart phones dedicated specifically to your business is one of the first steps to offering numerous, time saving, value added services that make your customers feel appreciated and their time and money valued. Like marketing genius Gary Vaynerchuk says, “I think that there are multiple billion-dollar companies and brands that will go out of business because they think of themselves too highly and are not engaging with their consumers in the way that they should be… ” and I could not agree more. Getting and using a smartphone for your business whether you are Walmart or a mom & pop pizza shop will allow you to engage your customers in a way that is authentic, helpful and make them feel valued. Why would your local customers shop or dine anywhere else?
Think outside the box and engage and your business will thrive. Think too highly of yourself to engage and you will make yourself irrelevant no matter how big your marketing effort and budget.
