How to grow your hospitality business with the help of “café culture”

Even though Britain is currently exiting the European Union, the values of European café culture are still central to the overarching café experience in the UK. However, so many hospitality businesses fail to grasp the importance of culture and community and think its all about flat whites and cappuccinos.

3POS have published a useful guide that can help businesses utilise their EPoS technologies, the strength of their local communities and their own spirit and personal values to help create a thriving café culture within their own hospitality venture:

“Today, even the smallest of cafes have the opportunity to build a community through social media accounts and other online tools. But while your staff are one of your biggest assets when trying to do this, digital tools are now making this even easier.

Customer Relationship Management

Customer engagement can be magnified by the more you know about them. Their favourite drink; how they like their sandwich; or whether they like to sit and stay or make a quick pick up, all of these things are important to that customer and will affect how they view their visit to your establishment that day.

Customer relationship management (CRM) tools enable you to build a picture of each individual customer and the relationship they have with your cafe. You will want to understand:

• What preferences they have
• How they prefer to receive information
• What they buy and have previously brought
• Whether they want deliveries at home or to work

Building a picture of these visitors creates a wealth of data for you to improve your service, not only to an individual customer, but to types or groups of customers that you can segment.

Loyalty and promotions

If you know enough about customers’ habits, you have the opportunity to target them with offers that you know they’ll be interested in. Someone who buys your vegan sausage roll every day is unlikely to make a visit because you’ve launched a new steak slice.

Ensuring your offers are relevant is a key ingredient to driving return visits. Customer loyalty programmes can also increase the likelihood of returning and when combining all of these together, you can build a relationship with every patron.

Deals, vouchers and discounts based on a solid knowledge of a person’s buying habits can lead to campaigns that deliver meaningful results to target audiences. Whether this is through an email campaign, social media, in-store POS or a combination of those, customer engagement grows with every successful interaction.

Integrating EPoS into your business

As well as increasing customer engagement through offers and building stronger relationships, our EPoS systems can help you with other aspects of your business too. Other ‘front of house’ tools include mobile payment, scale integration and handheld devices to speed up ordering.”

To run these types of sophisticated EPoS systems, you need a reliable network like the ones provided by Astaris.