Getting specific feedback from customers about your business is invaluable – it can help identify your strengths, but also where to make changes within the business. Furthermore, in today’s climate, where the cost-of-living crisis is already having an impact on consumer spending habits, ensuring your business ticks all the right boxes for customers can be the difference between a location that thrives and one that just about survives.
Without gathering feedback, you may have an idea of how your customers perceive your brand via social media, online reviews and ad hoc email or telephone correspondence, however the issue with solely relying on these forms of feedback is that they aren’t being recorded or measured in a structured way. It will be difficult to identify trends and patterns, and you won’t be able to categorise experiences by key indicators such as location, time, menu choice, service area etc. to give you even more insight into how different parts of the business are performing.
Without structured feedback, you’re also losing out on valuable analytical tools, such as benchmarking against your sites, as well as seeing how performance changes in time.
One of the most popular ways of capturing guest feedback is through a feedback survey page. You should consider a beautifully branded site you can pull up on a tablet during the guests’ visit to your venue, or send an invitation to via an email post-visit.
Key benefits of having a Feedback Site include:
You’ll want to ensure your feedback survey is capturing enough data so that you can draw meaningful insights, but also that it’s not so long as to put people off. It’s crucial to get the balance right when designing the survey questionnaire, enabling you to get a high volume of high-quality data.
As a minimum, a survey questionnaire should cover the following service areas:
This is where a Guest Experience Management platform comes in. A GEM platform enables you to collect all your data into one place and allows you to notice emerging trends and patterns. Our GEM platform - The Hub - allows you to view and filter each area of feedback by date, venue, score and questions, as well as any benchmarks you set. The Hub also highlights opportunities - what your business should focus on improving first, in order to get the maximum return.
Furthermore, you can compare your performance against industry benchmarks on a variety of KPIs, including NPS, to see how you’re doing compared to your competitors. If you have multiple sites, all of your feedback data can be categorised by venue location, and you can even provide access to your GM’s, allowing them to see how they compare to other sites in the estate – a bit of healthy competition is great for incentivising your teams to drive change.
Mystery Guest Audits are objective and are designed to assess whether your team is following your brand standards and steps of service. A Feedback Site, however, is open to every single customer who walks through your door and their feedback is subjective, allowing you to gather insight into your guests’ perception of your brand, décor, atmosphere etc. – things that are sometimes out of your teams’ control. Both objective and subjective feedback work well together to build up a 360-degree view of your venues’ performance and both Mystery Guest Audits and a Feedback Site are essential tools to measuring, monitoring and improving your Guest Experience.
So, we’ve established that collecting Guest Feedback is vital to gaining a good overview of what your customers want and expect from you. With this in mind, let’s explore how you can increase and maintain a high volume of feedback, here.
