Nowadays, the restaurant business is much more than just-food. It is all about providing a great dining experience to the customers. In order to stand apart from the crowd and stay ahead of the competition, restaurant brands are undergoing a huge transformation. Though some restaurants are modernizing their spaces and others are enhancing the technology feature for the overall functionality. Renovation of a restaurant can elevate the brand image and creates a long-lasting impression in the eyes of customers. However, it can be a tedious and costly affair to renovate from scratch. In this article, you will get to know the effective steps that can be implemented while remodelling your restaurant brand.
How to Plan for a Restaurant Renovation?
Renovating your restaurant can add new life to your business. It is good to keep it relevant and update as per the trending phase. This will enhance the brand value and keep it abreast with the competition.
Check out the factors that you need to work on when you’re planning for the successful restaurant renovation:
Good Market Research: It is very important to know what works best for your restaurant and what can be the possible areas of improvement. Before the renovation of the restaurant, understanding the entire customer and market dynamics is essential. Taking customer feedback is important to have a good understanding of their tastes and preferences. You need to know about which area your restaurant needs improvement such as food, ambience or the service. Check your social media accounts, get insights from the surveys or place suggestion boxes to get an understanding of what improvements your customers are looking for.
The restaurant business is competitive. No matter, whether your restaurant serves the best food still it can lack behind many others serving better. Due to unable to adapt as per changing trends, your restaurant can lose the customers. So, it is important to do a competitive analysis of how similar restaurant formats are performing. Knowing what technology they are adopting to enhance efficiency. Create a USP of the own-brand to overcome the challenges.
Doing all these and following proper strategy would help you prepare your restaurant to face the challenges and not lose out on customers.
Redefine the Dine-In Experience: As per the Competition Commission of India, restaurants are facing issues as online party aggregators are expanding dine-in businesses. There are many people who would like to enjoy the meals at the comfort of their homes which has increased the online food delivery. In order to attract more diners in your restaurant, you need to create an experiential dining experience.
For an overall brand experience, there are many elements that restaurateurs need to consider:
Recreate the Restaurant Space: Changing the seating arrangement, you can use and optimize the restaurant space better. You can accommodate more customers during peak hours even though your restaurant is not largely built. Make sure to keep enough space between the tables for your diners and servers to manage the space.
Work on the interiors: Refreshing the interiors doesn’t mean to change the theme of the restaurant it means to enhance the look and feel of the restaurant. You can choose the thematic decorative according to your restaurant format and opt for decorative, comfortable seating, light fixtures.
Customer Engagement: Attract the customers by sending them customized offers, coupons and various other attractive payment options that provide those cashback. Tie-ups with the partners and offer complimentary dishes which can further drive more customers to your restaurant.
Renovate the Menu: A good menu creates interest and attracts a lot of customers. On the contrary, the same menu for a long time loses the interest of customers. It is recommended to keep your menu updated at least once in a year with the changing trends. This will help bring more customers to your brand and allow you to make decisions related to the performance of items and change the price accordingly.
As a restaurateur, it is important to know what your customers are looking for in a menu. What is their favourite and which is the most popular among your customers? Do you provide value for money from your services? Restaurant POS system provides detail individual reports such as item wise sales, outlet wise sales, food costs, total inventory consumption. With this information, you can check on which items are the most sold and which items were the least profitable. You can remove the ones that are not doing well and accordingly make the changes in the menu pricing. Also, you can highlight the best selling items and update your menu with a seasonal item or occasional offers.
Redesign for Better Efficiency: Good design with proper kitchen infrastructure is a must for better efficiency of any food business. Make sure that the kitchen infrastructure is supported by modern technology. Your staff has better equipment and machinery and your kitchen matches the health and cleanliness standards.
The back end of your restaurant should be equipped with modern technology in order to streamline the entire order mechanism. Also, ensure that your staff is in sync with your redevelopment plans.
Be Consistent: Remodeling your restaurant should be done keeping in mind the aesthetics of the restaurant. Keep in mind that your core values always remain intact to differentiate from the competitive brands. Your customers should be able to connect with your brand even if you revamp your brand.
It is important to adapt according to the changing customer needs while ensuring that the standards of consistency remain the same in the overall services of your business. You can adapt the menu as per your customers changing the taste but maintain the consistent taste across all the outlets. Differentiate your brand with the others to and ensure to maintain consistency in terms of food and kitchen and follow the standardization techniques in your restaurant’s backend.
Never Forget to Communicate: Make your customers aware of the changes you are going to implement in your restaurant chain. To ensure that they know that your brand is undergoing changes, follow proper Marketing and PR campaigns to communicate all the details on a regular basis. You can pass on the communication through your social media channels too.
With the right planning and following these effective steps, you can easily renovate your restaurant!
