Considering how saturated and competitive restaurants, lounges, and cafes are in Nigeria, bringing guests through your doors once is only half the battle. You need advantage or leverage that makes it easy for guests to come back again and again and even tell others about your brand.

With this kind of advantage, 

• Customers will easily choose your brand again, making it easier to fill your restaurant, lounge, or cafe without excessive effort or constant promotions.

• Your marketing spend starts working harder for you. Acquiring a new customer costs money so if you can turn a one-time visit into repeat visits, your return on investment will increase significantly. If you do this consistently, you’ll build a very reliable customer base that generates revenue without needing costly marketing activities. 

• Your customers will become one of your most powerful growth channels. The more positive experiences people have with your restaurant, the more likely they are to recommend it. Considering that 20–50% of purchasing decisions are influenced by referrals, this is not a strategy to overlook. When guests spread the word for you, bookings increase easily and often faster than paid marketing ever could.

Turning first-time customers into loyal guests is one of the smartest ways to boost your revenue and ensure long-term success.

So the goal now is to have strategies that drive repeat purchases and word of mouth that will help you fill seats with ease, cut down on marketing costs, and see more referral.

How to keep your customers coming back and talking about your brand

1. Empower your team to deliver compelling customer experiences

Customer experience, often called CX, is the impression and feeling customers have about your brand based on the kind of interaction you and your team have with them.

It’s similar to what happens in families sometimes. Many people grow up feeling unloved by their parents. The thing is that love actually exists, but everyday interactions from parents send a wrong signal to the children, making them feel unloved. So, as the children grow into adults, they begin to limit interactions with their parents to avoid emotional discomfort. Simply put, the way parents interact with their children shapes the experience those children have at home and that experience can either make them want to come home often or not. 

The same pattern exists in business, including  restaurants, café, and lounges. The decisions you make as Manager and the way your team interacts with guests shapes the guest experience (the impression or feeling they associate with your brand) and that experience can make them intentionally come back again and again, come back by accident, or never visit your business again.

One of the dangers with CX is that it can slowly take years to run a business down without anyone suspecting it as the cause of the decline. 

Blockbuster is a good example of this. While its failure is often attributed to technology, customer experience played a major role. High late fees and unfavourable policies frustrated customers for years. People just tolerated the experience until an alternative appeared. When Netflix offered a more convenient option, customers left in numbers and Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy in 2010.

Consistency is king 

For customer experience to deliver real results, such as repeat visits and word-of-mouth referrals, something has to happen inside the customer. They need to like and trust your business, and both need time to happen. 

This is why consistency matters. A single great experience can impress someone, but repeated good experiences is what will change how they think and feel about your brand. 

When customers receive compelling experiences repeatedly, they begin to consciously associate your brand with a great experience. Their brain goes, ‘O, these people actually care so much’. it is at this point that they begin to intentionally choose your brand over others because their mind is now conscious of the difference. And even when asked for recommendations, your brand can easily come to mind because it has earned that position through consistency.

2. Impact customers emotionally

I think this point may be the hiccup for my fellow Nigerians reading this. Our social culture often discourages open expression of emotions and they’re usually seen as weak or unimportant. But ignoring or underestimating the power of emotions does not reduce their influence either in our lives or in our businesses.

A 2024 Qualtrics survey of 10,000 customers revealed that the emotional dimension of customer experience has the biggest impact on loyalty outcomes. In other words, customers who feel emotionally satisfied are far more likely to buy more and recommend a brand than those who only have smooth transactions.

What I’m trying to say is that not every experience sticks. On average, we live through about 600 million moments in a lifetime and roughly 600,000 in a month. Yet we forget the majority of them and only remember the few that carry emotional weight. That's why you can easily recall moments from five years ago but struggle to remember most of what happened 5 days ago.

When guests return to your restaurant intentionally, it’s not only because the food is good or because the experience is great. Plenty of places serve good food and deliver great experiences too. They come back because they REMEMBER how they FELT there the last time and want to feel the same way again.

You know, as Maya Angelou said, people may forget what you said or did, but they'll never forget how you made them feel.

So, if you’re going to put effort into creating great experiences, make them emotionally resonant. Your customer experience team, along with everyone in your company, needs to understand which emotions matter most to customers and how to design experiences that positively impact those feelings.

Whatever is worth doing is worth doing well.

This brings us to a two-part question: How do you consistently create experiences that are emotionally impactful? Or, put another way, how do you create experiences that are truly memorable?

Kill two birds with one stone: how to create experiences that bring customers back and get them talking

To do this, you need an OBI, which stands for Operational Big Idea.

An OBI is a strategic statement that guides every decision and action your team takes. It ensures they can consistently create great experiences, no matter the situation or where they encounter a customer.

It equips everyone to

• Understand the emotional and functional experience your customers expect.

• Deliver consistent experiences across touchpoints, shifts, and locations.

• Turn everyday customer touchpoints into memorable moments that inspire loyalty and referrals. 

With the OBI, your team doesn't have to rely on their mood, personality, or luck to create great experiences. Every interaction is guided by a clear operating principle that builds trust and delight, inspiring customers to choose your restaurant over and over again.

One touching example shows just how powerful this mindset can be. A customer, Zaz Lamarr, needed to return a pair of shoe but had just lost her mother and was struggling to cope. 

When Zappos reached out about the return, she explained the situation. Instead of following standard policy, some team members  arranged to have the shoes collected directly from her home at no cost. 

But they didn’t stop there. Shortly afterward, Zaz received a surprise delivery: a basket of fresh flowers with a heartfelt note of condolence from the Zappos team.

In her own words, Zaz shared: 

“Yesterday, when I came home from town, a florist delivery man was just leaving. It was a beautiful arrangement in a basket with white lilies and roses and carnations. Big and lush and fragrant. I opened the card, and it was from Zappos.

As their former CEO, Tony Hsieh puts it, "We didn't know it at the time, but all the hard work and investments we made into customer service and company culture would pave the way for us to hit our goal of $1 billion in gross merchandise sales in 2008—two years ahead of our original goal of 2010.

Now, that's what an OBI does: it empowers your team to solve problems and create unforgettable moments customers love to share, moments that attract others to your brand too.”

How to create an OBI

The OBI has five core layers, though we sometimes add more depending on the goals of a given business and the competitive landscape.

How your team can reflect the big idea in everyday interactions 

Creating an OBI is only half the work. What makes it effective is the strength of execution behind it. For an OBI to truly work, it must be woven into the fabric of your leadership processes and daily operations. Here are a few tips to help.

Behavioral strengths and mindset shifts for bringing the big idea to life

This is the factor most leaders overlook. At Potior Satori, we emphasize mindset shifts and behavioral strength because at the end of the day, all humans are humans whether we all wear suits, hold big titles, or run companies. Our character strengths and flaws show up everywhere, even in customer interactions.

A CEO who is impatient or rigid might walk away from a partnership that could have worked if only they were more flexible. A team member who lacks empathy may unintentionally turn away a loyal customer. 

If a team member believes customers should focus on the food only, that staff will have a hard time interacting with customers in ways that make them delighted about being in your spot. 

Customer loyalty is easy to stir when teams have the right “sauce”;  the emotional intelligence and character to make customers want to return and share their experiences.

A gentle nudge 

You don’t have to answer these on your own. Involve your team in this exercise. They know themselves best and can often see the mindset shifts they’ll need to make more clearly than you can. By inviting them in, you avoid overlooking important perspectives and make it easier for everyone to own the process.

A note on changes 

Some mindset shifts will only begin to take root months after the OBI is in motion. This is because not all beliefs are easy to identify at the start. Often, it is only when the team begins making changes and faces obstacles that hidden beliefs come to light. These challenges push them to reflect and realize that further adjustments are needed.

That’s why it’s important to follow up with your team and provide steady support. 

Check in regularly – weekly or bi-weekly – with two simple questions:

1. What have you been working on to bring the OBI to life?

2. What obstacles are blocking your progress?

This kind of focused conversation will make it easier for your team to pinpoint real challenges. If you only ask general questions like “How are things going?” you’ll likely get surface level answers such as “fine” or “great,” which don’t reveal much.

How to measure success

Depending on your specific business goals and industry landscape, you'll have some unique KPI to help you see your progress with the OBI.

Those fundamental ones are your retention rate, NPS, NRR, ENCR, and EGR.

Retention rate tells you how much of your customers you’ve retained in a given time.

NPS which is short for net promoter score measures how inspired your existing customers are to recommend your brand to others. There’s a lot about NPS that I can't even talk about now.

NRR is net revenue retention. It tells you how much of your revenue in a given time came from existing or retained customers. 

ENCR is your earned new customer rate. it measures how much new revenue came from referrals or word of mouth (not paid marketing).

EGR is earned growth rate. With it, you can track the total amount of revenue growth your business generates through referrals and returning customers. It’s simply the total output you get when you add NRR and ENCR together. 

Takeaways

• The restaurant, café, and lounge industry in Nigeria is highly saturated and competitive. Opening your doors is easy; getting guests to return consistently is the real challenge.

• Relying on discounts, promos, or price competition is not sustainable. These tactics attract attention, but they rarely build loyalty.

• Long-term growth comes from customer experience. How guests are treated, how consistent that treatment is, and how they feel during and after each visit determine whether they return or move on.

• Consistency builds trust. When guests receive the same thoughtful experience over time, they begin to prefer your brand and recommend it to others.

• To achieve that, customer experience must be operationalized, not left to chance or individual personality.

• An Operational Big Idea (OBI) gives your team a shared guide for decisions and actions, ensuring consistent, emotionally resonant experiences across shifts, touchpoints, and locations.

In a crowded market, emotionally resonant experience is one of the few sources of true differentiation. It helps increase retention, reduce marketing costs, and drive organic growth through referrals.