Business challenge
A restaurant chain wanted to drive transaction volume growth by expanding its customer base beyond existing loyal customers. The goal of this research was to identify barriers and drivers for different customer segments to enhance acquisition and retention strategies.
- Why do non-customers not visit, and how can they entice them to visit?
- Why did lapsed customers stop visiting and how can they win them back?
- How can they get current customers to visit more often?
- How does this vary by different consumer segments e.g. demographics, family type, party size, meal occasions, purchase channels used
Our approach
There were multiple stages to this research:
Stage 1: Market Sizing to assess the size of different segments and where the biggest opportunities lie.
- Key segments we focused on were non-customers (rejectors/ considers), lapsed customers (rejectors/ considers), current customers (infrequent/ medium frequency/ high frequency)
Stage 2: Online quantitative survey (continuing on from the market sizing) gathering feedback from over 2000 respondents.
- This included questions to understand ordering and eating behaviours across different channels (dining in the restaurant, delivery and collection), likelihood to eat at the client’s restaurant vs. competitors, barriers to visit the restaurant at all or more often by different channels – with a total of 49 barriers tested by both scale questions and Max Diff exercises.
Stage 3: x8 focus groups speaking to different segments and different demographic profiles within (by age and family status).
- This expanded on the top barriers identified in the quantitative phase and delved into them further, along with recommendations on how they could improve.
Stage 4: x40 WhatsApp tasks with respondents from the focus groups – across the different customer types.
- Respondents were asked to complete a ‘mission’ exercise and visit/ get delivery/ collect from their local restaurant and share video feedback about their experience.
- Before and after going on the mission respondents completed a series scale questions to understand how their perceptions of the restaurant changed before and after. The missions were proven to be especially useful in seeing perception shifts for lapsed customers and non-customers.
- At the end of the research they were asked if they would visit the restaurant again and why/ why not.
Outcome
The results from the research provided different stakeholders across the business with direction on what to focus on to improve their customer growth strategy, this included easy/ quick wins all the way to larger/ long-term changes. The video voxpops and case studies brought the research to life, allowing stakeholders to hear directly from consumers and further engage them to take action as a result of the research.