How to get your staff to actually sign people up
Training explains the ask once. Why a specific line beats a reminder, how turnover breaks hand-me-down training, and what to measure instead of a leaderboard.
The sign is up. The QR code is in the right place. Everyone on the team has been told to mention the card. And enrollment still depends on who happens to be working that shift.
That gap is not a design problem. What to put next to the till covers the sign, the placement and the one sentence worth saying at the till. This is the part underneath it: why a team that agrees the card is worth mentioning still does not mention it, and what makes the habit survive a busy Saturday and a new hire.
Key takeaways
- A general reminder to “mention the loyalty card” is easy to agree with and easy to forget under pressure. A specific line tied to a specific moment is what actually gets said.
- Hospitality staff turnover ran at 52% in the most recent UK sector breakdown, against a 34% all-sector average. Training that lives in one person’s head does not survive that rate of change.
- Write the line down and hand it to a new starter on day one, not once they have settled in.
- Watch enrollment as a trend, not a leaderboard. The goal is a quiet word with whoever has stopped asking, not a scoreboard on the staff room wall.
- Be careful what you reward. A bonus per signup can turn a calm ask into a hard sell, which works against the whole point of the card.
Why staff agree, and still stop asking
Ask any team whether the loyalty card is worth mentioning and almost everyone says yes. Watch a Friday evening shift and the ask has usually stopped happening by the second hour.
Nothing dramatic causes that. Someone is three drinks deep into a queue and the ask costs four seconds they do not feel they have. Nobody tells them whether it worked, so there is no feedback pulling the habit back. And a loyalty card is easy to file next to “upselling”, which most people in a service job have been trained, correctly, to be wary of overdoing with a tired customer.
The fix is not a stricter instruction. It is a smaller, more specific one.
Give them one sentence, not a reminder to mention it
“Remember to mention the card” is a general intention, and general intentions are exactly the kind that get crowded out the moment the till queue backs up.
A large body of psychology research backs this up directly. Peter Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran’s meta-analysis of implementation intentions pools 94 independent tests of linking a specific cue to a specific action. It found a medium-to-large effect on whether people actually followed through, compared with holding a general goal in mind (d = .65) (Gollwitzer and Sheeran, “Implementation Intentions and Goal Achievement: A Meta-Analysis of Effects and Processes”, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, Vol. 38, 2006, pp. 69 to 119).
The plans that worked best were “if-then”: if this specific situation happens, I do this specific thing. A vague goal, however well-intentioned, does not get the same boost.
Applied to a till: “mention the card sometime” is a goal. “When someone pays, say: there’s a card if you want it, tenth coffee’s free” is an if-then plan. The line matters less than the fact that it is fixed, short, and tied to one moment that happens on every shift: the payment.
Pick one line. Write it down. Do not let each staff member improvise their own version, because a team of five individual judgment calls is a team where the ask quietly disappears on the busiest days, which is precisely when it matters most.
Training has to survive someone leaving
The UK’s average annual staff turnover sat at 34% in the most recent full-year breakdown. Hospitality ran highest among the sectors measured, at 52% (CIPD analysis of ONS Annual Population Survey data, 2022 to 2023, published 11 June 2024). Retail turnover was lower but still substantial. Whatever your trade, the person trained carefully in January is, on the sector average, not a safe bet to still be on the rota by summer.
That makes “ask Priya, she’s good at it” a plan with a built-in expiry date. The line has to live somewhere other than one experienced person’s habits: written on a card taped by the till, included in the first-shift checklist before a new starter is ever handed the till float, repeated at a team meeting rather than assumed to have stuck from the one time it was mentioned during onboarding.
The point is not to over-formalize a four-word sentence. It is that the four words need to outlast the person who currently says them best.
Watch the trend, not a leaderboard
Loyalty program metrics makes the case that repeat-visit rate is the number that matters most, but enrollment is the gate everything else sits behind, and it is worth watching on its own terms too. Passumo’s dashboard shows growth in members over time, so a flat week or a sudden jump is visible without anyone counting by hand.
What that number cannot tell you is which shift it happened on. For that, match the trend against your own rota: a quiet week that lines up with a particular pattern of shifts is worth a conversation, not a guess.
Keep that conversation private and useful rather than public and competitive. A leaderboard pinned in the staff room turns a calm four-second ask into a target to hit, and a team chasing a number tends to ask everyone, including the customer who clearly wants to pay and leave. The quieter version, a one-to-one word with whoever has stopped asking, fixes the same problem without changing how the ask feels to the customer on the other side of the till.
Should you pay a bonus per signup?
It is tempting, and worth being cautious about. A bonus paid per card added rewards volume, and volume is not quite the thing you want. An enrollment someone has to be talked into converts worse than one offered calmly, and a per-head bonus pushes every incentive in the wrong direction: toward asking harder rather than asking consistently.
There is no published study we could find that measures commission-style signup bonuses against the quality or pushiness of the resulting signups specifically in a loyalty-card setting, so treat the recommendation that follows as judgment rather than a finding. A team-level reward tied to a realistic enrollment target, shared across everyone on the rota rather than paid per person per card, keeps the incentive pointed at consistency instead of pressure. Nobody feels they personally need this one customer to say yes, and the habit stays the calm version that actually works.
Frequently asked questions
What if a staff member thinks asking is annoying for the customer? That instinct is usually a good one to keep, just aimed at the wrong target. A single calm line at the moment of payment is not the same as a hard sell, and most of the discomfort disappears once the line is fixed and short rather than something each person has to invent and judge in the moment.
Does this still matter with only one or two staff, including the owner? Yes, and it is easier to fix. With one or two people the habit is really a personal one rather than a team system, but it still benefits from being written down rather than relied on from memory on a tired day.
How long before a change here shows up in the numbers? Give it a couple of weeks of a consistent line before judging it. Enrollment also depends on footfall and the offer itself, so compare the trend against your own recent weeks rather than against a general benchmark.
Should the owner be the one asking, or is that a cop-out for staff who skip it? Either works, as long as it happens on every shift, not only the ones the owner is personally on. If the owner is the only one who ever asks, enrollment will track the owner’s rota, which is the same gap this article is about, one level up.
What if someone keeps forgetting even after being told? Treat it as a habit problem rather than a character problem. A card by the till as a physical reminder, and a quiet check-in rather than a confrontation, fixes more of this than a stern reminder does.
Where to go next
The sign, the placement and the exact line to say are in what to put next to the till. What a new member’s first month should look like once they are actually signed up is in the first thirty days after someone joins, and the number worth watching once enrollment is steady is in loyalty program metrics. The full sequence from a blank card to a working program is the complete guide.
Passumo tracks member growth over time on the dashboard, so the trend this article asks you to watch is already there waiting, without separate spreadsheets or manual counts.
Sources: Peter M. Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran, “Implementation Intentions and Goal Achievement: A Meta-Analysis of Effects and Processes”, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, Vol. 38 (2006), pp. 69 to 119, 94 independent tests. CIPD, Benchmarking employee turnover, published 11 June 2024, analysis of ONS Annual Population Survey data, January 2022 to December 2023.
