It is common knowledge that customer needs are never stagnant. Especially in today’s complex consumer landscape, where products and services are readily available and businesses are never short of providing variety, it can be tough to stay relevant.
Obtaining customer feedback, whether positive or negative, has grown to be a popular way of driving business success, especially in such a highly competitive industry like restaurant or food services.
For these verticals, adopting a customer feedback platform can make all the difference by providing the tools to elevate the customer experience, improve team service, gain a deeper understanding of business operations, and create a more durable strategy for the future.
In order to help you make the move towards adopting a feedback solution, we’ve crafted the top three signs to determine when the timing is right to make such an investment.
You’re Having Trouble Retaining Customers
If you’re struggling to get customers to return to your restaurant, you might not be tending to them and their needs effectively. In most instances, restaurants that struggle with retaining customers, do so because they have trouble understanding what customers want and how to offer their service in a way that makes them happy and loyal.
For restaurants, obtaining feedback from your customers plays a big role in customer retention. It means asking guests for genuine feedback about various aspects of their experience, listening to what they have to say and then doing something about their comments and concerns. Guests in this day and age want to be heard and they want to be tended to in a meaningful way. By being proactive through prompt surveys and then perfecting your service – you open up more avenues for customer retention and build trust and loyalty for long-term success.
In order to gain the most effective and timely feedback, we suggest adopting a modern feedback platform. With the capabilities of such a solution, you can gain a more holistic view of the customer experience without direct confrontation. It will additionally ensure that customers are able to express their concerns on the channel of their choice at their convenience. Whether via an in-restaurant kiosk or a mobile device, it’s an opportunity to help steer customers away from venting their issues online and an opportunity to fix issues in real time. Lastly, because a feedback solution enables a level of anonymity you increase the chance of a customer telling you how they really feel, so you can discover the bigger issues at hand.
Your Restaurant Is Receiving Backlash Online
It goes without saying that having people talk negatively about your restaurant on social can have detrimental effects on your brand’s public image. With studies showing a whopping “77 percent of Americans having a social media profile”, it’s a medium all businesses need to master.
If your restaurant isn’t getting the best responses via social, it might be because you aren’t asking for feedback or you’re not asking for it in a timely manner. Feedback is an essential tool to recover customers and to have an insider’s view of how you are performing – so you can consistently work at perfecting service in real-time. Without feedback, and without a solution to gather feedback, managing your reputation online can be a complex undertaking.
In order to better manage your online reputation, a feedback solution should be a top consideration. With it, you can be proactive about negative guest sentiment. Instead of waiting for them to leave and then send them a survey, you can ask them to submit feedback during and immediately after their visit. This way, if a guest has a bad experience, they can submit it directly to management instead of having them broadcast it online. In addition, management can receive it in real-time and resolve the issue immediately.
Using social media shouldn’t be a burden, be complex, nor detract from the reputation you’ve worked hard to build. When used in conjunction with a feedback solution, social media profiles dedicated to your restaurant are a great way to show customers transparency and build brand advocacy.
Your Employees Aren’t Motivated.
Employee engagement has played an important role in flourishing businesses for many years. From improving service for guests to reducing costly employee churn, it makes the entire brand experience more powerful and uplifting.
If you’re employees dread coming to work or you start to notice a lack of effort in employee service, this could be a sign that they need more motivation in the form of guest feedback. Although gathering feedback may seem like a more guest-focused tactic to improve business success, it also houses a plethora of benefits for your internal team. It can help improve company culture, perfect service, and help motivate your teams by making the entire experience more fun and engaging.
With the incorporation of a feedback platform, you can gamify both simple and complex tasks, making them fun for staff to perform while evolving with customer demands. An ideal feedback platform will create a sense of urgency through scoring and encourage teams to challenge themselves and each other in specific aspects of their work. The friendly form of competition that it exudes will improve the quality of tasks, push teams to have greater time management, and allow them to be more self-aware of how they perform.
By being more self-aware and knowing where they need improvements, they can deliver higher quality service or products that lead to happier guests and growing revenue.
Conclusion
For the restaurant and food service verticals, adopting a feedback platform can make all the difference when it comes to the success of your brand. If you’re struggling with team motivation, online backlash, and customer retention, it might be time to consider a feedback platform as a tool for getting yourself on track.
Discover why now more than ever it is important to listen to customer preferences and how you can implement it into your customer experience program by reading our white paper: The New Voice of The Customer.
