When Should I Renovate My Business?
January 2025
CONTRIBUTING EXPERTS:
GREG CARDELLINI, SENIOR MANAGER, SALES AND SALES OPERATIONS | EIS NORTH AMERICA
When considering how to improve the customer experience at your business, don’t overlook the impact of the interior. An interior that creates the right atmosphere, improves convenience, and helps customers achieve their goals is how to enhance the customer experience.
Making your business an enjoyable place encourages more people to visit. Effective interior design tips are also customer experience tips.
If you own a business, you’re probably familiar with the idiom, “spend money to make money.” This principle drives many larger brands in the restaurant, retail, and hotel industries to renovate their locations on a regular schedule.
How do you know when to remodel? What are the reasons that could make a commercial renovation worthwhile? Below are a few tips on knowing when it’s time to renovate.
Remember, the right commercial interior professionals can help you identify and achieve your interior design goals.
Ditch the Wear and Tear
Subway | Shanghai, China
Hans im Glück | Berlin, Germany (EIS General Contracting)
McDonald’s | Unterhaching, Germany (EIS General Contracting)
How you present yourself is important, and that principle applies to how your business presents itself to guests or customers. If your furniture and fixtures are worn out, dinged up, or otherwise shabby, it might give customers the impression that you don’t care, that you don’t value the customer experience, that you’re not up to date, or that you don’t make the effort to sweat the details.
Your interior serves as the first thing a customer notices about you. Do you really want a customer’s first impression of your business to be outdated and worn-out furniture and fixtures?
First impressions are hard to change, even if your customer service is top-notch.
Enhance the Customer Experience
Sake Express | Gastonia, North Carolina, USA
Reece Bath + Kitchen | Spring, Texas, USA
Tayron Coffee (Shanghai Jiao Tong University) | Shanghai, China
Your business renovation – whether it’s a hotel renovation, restaurant renovation, or retail renovation – needs to be focused on how you can improve the guest experience.
The atmosphere of your business obviously impacts the mood. But there are practical concerns, too. What is the traffic flow in your business like? What are guests at your business trying to accomplish, and how easy is it for them to do that?
You want guests at your restaurant to be able to sit comfortably and really enjoy their time dining, so they want to come back for another pleasant experience. How can you organize your space so that they aren’t inconvenienced by too much traffic, or noise from the kitchen, or a cold breeze directly from the air vent? The right professionals can help you navigate stumbling blocks with thoughtful restaurant interior design tips.
Do guests at your hotel prioritize convenient amenities for business trips, or are they leisure travelers looking for experiences? A luxurious lobby can help provide experience seekers with an unforgettable home base for their trip, while a well-laid-out grab-and-go market can provide great value to business travelers on the go. Consumer behaviors are always changing, and you may need to update your space to provide what your customers expect.
Accommodate New Technology
Burger King | Vösendorf, Austria
Frittenwerk | Flensburg, Germany
How people use technology to interact with your products and services changes over time, and your space should accommodate those technologies.
Things like online orders and cashier-less checkouts have become staples of the modern convenience expectations of diners and shoppers.
New Products or Offerings You Want to Feature
Tru by Hilton | Lubbock, Texas, USA
PROSE | Denver, Colorado
Fuel America | Worcester, Massachusetts, USA
How products are displayed and how prominently they are displayed can influence the purchasing decisions of shoppers and guests. Product displays, posters, and other décor can help advertise your featured products.
Your store layout plays a big role, too. By considering the retail customer experience, you can influence traffic flow to the products you want to feature.
If you know you have a very popular product that draws a lot of traffic, by understanding how people get to that product, you can be sure they see along the way other products you think would interest them.
Brand Repositioning
As consumer tastes change, so do how brands present themselves. It’s a tried-and-true tactic to attract new customers. Even some of the oldest and largest brands tend to make some tweaks to their branding to attract new customers or clients. When this occurs, you want your interior to reflect your new branding, so the customer experience is as fresh as the paint on your sign.
Updating your branding won’t make much of an impact if the atmosphere and customer experience remain unchanged.
———
Remember that commercial renovation projects are all about improving the guest or customer experience. If you want to attract new customers or develop loyal ones, thinking about the shopping or dining experience is vital. You want a commercial space that makes customers feel like they’re having a good time. If a space offers this, customers will return.
About Elkay Interior Systems
Elkay Interior Systems (EIS) is a tight-knit team of industry-leading designers, commercial-grade manufacturers, innovative engineers, resourceful project managers, and sourcing experts committed to every stage of your project by guaranteeing quality and reliability. We stand out from the crowd with our 40+ years of global experience in the restaurant, hospitality, retail, and education markets. We believe in simplifying the complicated.