Good Basics Make Great Habits.

The keys to building revenue in every business are understanding the lifetime value of a customer and learning how to turn occasional users into habitual ones. So I was glad to contribute to a discussion of that kind of success for the cover story in the current issue of Restaurantville Monthly, Eat/Pay/Love – Creating Customer Loyalty.

One of our clients read the article and told me it contained “very good wisdom and a nice refresher of the basics.” It’s a good reminder of why certain things become cliché. The truth is that humans, by nature, have a lot of choices on where to focus, and they make better choices through reinforcement. Often, a company leader is asked, “Why do we have to repeat the basics in staff meetings, manager meetings, or pre-shifts and in daily text messages? We don’t need reminders. They are repetitious–we know our stuff.”

But even the people who say they don’t need to be reminded of the basics do better when they are reminded. What has worked well for organizations is to remind people in an interactive way, where anecdotal evidence is used as confirmation that good things are happening with guests or customers, for instance. There are some great anecdotes of this sort in Rebecca Robinson’s story.