Alex Beltrani, CEO of Tattle: 3 Things to Look Out for When Setting Up Your Hospitality Feedback Process
When done right, collecting, measuring, and leveraging guest feedback data can be one of the most powerful processes used by businesses to drive guest satisfaction and increase revenue across locations.
Theoretically, it sounds simple, right? Collect feedback, measure what matters, improve guests satisfaction, print money. In practice, the process is much more easily said than done as feedback requires transparency, full team participation, and goal-setting to unlock its most impactful potential.
However, since feedback data collection is more deeply understood at the executive level and among department teams (C-Levels, Marketing, Ops, Data Analysts, Culinary, etc…), let’s begin at the top with a few simple strategies to ensure the most tactful measurement of guest feedback data from broad to granular-level insights.
1. Make sure you’re collecting feedback across all your guest ordering channels.
As a starter, the macro-analysis of guest feedback data begins with your guest ordering channels, usually consisting of the Dine-In, Order Ahead, Delivery, and Drive-Thru experiences, among others. The purposes of collecting feedback across ordering channels is because the guest experience is radically different by channel; across certain brands, the variety of ordering channels have been expressed to our team at Tattle as feeling like managing entirely different businesses.
With the guest’s ability to use their smart phone as the remote control to their lives, the rise in digital ordering and decrease in human interaction requires proper visibility of opaque ordering channels beyond merely the Dine-In experience. Through a multi-channel survey setup, the ability to identify the right opportunities and signals across guest experiences becomes a unique and targeted brand advantage.
2. Benchmark these ordering channels across each of your brand’s districts and locations.
Once a specific survey is created for each ordering channel, understanding the performance of these channels across your districts and locations will allow your team to more actionably identify opportunities.
Momentarily, let’s imagine that we collected enough initial guest feedback data, and quickly discerned that the Order Ahead experience yielded the lowest guest satisfaction among guest ordering channels. While this is incredibly helpful to identify as a brand opportunity, we really need to understand specifically where this guest satisfaction originates.
Is it the entire brand? Perhaps, just a couple districts? Or, is it handful of locations that are severely dragging down the entire ordering channel?
Through understanding where specific dissatisfaction of the Order Ahead experience lives, you allow yourself to efficiently roll up your sleeves, dig into the data of under-performing districts or locations, and empower onsite teams to make a conscious effort to improve these areas of dissatisfaction. Generally, full-team participation and goal-setting towards a particular objective helps quickly eradicate guest dissatisfaction; without full-time involvement, the issue will simply remain.
3. Distill your ordering channel, district and location-level data even further by asking the right survey questions.
After the macro-data setup has been successfully established among ordering channels and locations, the individual survey questions soon become the northern lights for teams as these questions highlight the micro-operational areas that can now be instantly addressed.
Taking a step back, it’s important to understand that the guest experience is vast. Hundreds of thousands of team training and development hours conducted, millions of dollars invested in new locations, menu innovation and design, and an endless commitment towards conquering the opaque foresight of guest wants and needs finally surface as the product that is the guest experience.
These individual survey questions each represent a link in the chain of the guest’s overall experience, ranging from the staff’s greeting to the cleanliness of the restaurant and the hospitality of the staff to the temperature of the food. Asking the most granular survey questions allows teams to closely monitor and take action against the more deficient areas of the operational experience that can serve to compromise the overall experience of guests.
The granular survey questions invite the most actionable and efficient opportunities. As famously stated, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.
Alex Beltrani is the CEO of Tattle. Learn more at get.tattleapp.com.
