I'm examining the ways in which hospitality operators develop an understanding of exactly what their customers want from them.
So if you're driven by customer feedback, how do you attain it in the first place? How do you ensure you and your staff fully understand the customer's experience of your business? For example, I once heard of a hotelier that will sit down on the loo in order to get a view of the room generally only seen by guests.
Please be as specific as possible!
Thanks.
One good example that I have heard about is rewarding top performers with a meal out for two at a competitor restaurant. They then have to report back to the team on how they found it so they could a) experience eating out from the customer’s perspective again and b) be on the lookout for ideas they can take back to help benefit their own customers’ experience because it’s everyone within a team who can make a difference to how service is delivered, not just management.
There are of course tools that can help if you are looking for a greater volume of customer communications: www.mysterydining.com/feedback
The best operators will get their whole teams involved in reviewing any results, wherever they are generated from, and owning any decisions made. In order for this to happen (and not get forgotten) it needs to be actively planned as part of the routine.
That's a really great idea, thanks. The whole team benefits from the experience in terms of dvelopment and the meal is a motivator for good performance. I imagine there's a risk that if this is mis-managed, no one would want the prize if it seems like hard work!
I have heard that some operators hold regular team meetings to discuss ways that the business can be improved. No one is better equipped than the internal customers (employees) of that business to provide that feedback. It is also a great opportunity to discuss feedback about other restaurants, which may have been visited as a matter of course.
Of course the challenge is then to act on that feedback and make a difference - ownership is key!
Employee feedback is extremely important - annual employee satisfaction surveys are another great way to obtain feedback about the business and how it can be improved. The benefit is this feedback is confidential and potentially more revealing.
Chris
www.AssuredCustomerExperience.com
That would make sense - frontline staff are best placed to report on consumer behaviour. And employee feedback is probably easier to come by than customer feedback.
Personally, I'm a little frustrated when customer satisfaction checks feel like a box-ticking exercise... it happens a lot in high street chain restaurants. Two minutes after your food has arrived, your waiter asks a closed question like 'is everything ok?' just as you have a mouthful of food, so that all you can do is nod.
I guess what I'm really trying to find are very practical, simple actions that can be taken to see through the eyes of the customer. Ultimately the best way to find out what customers want is is to ask them, I suppose. But how can operators engage with their audience in an insightful way without being intrusive?
In my opinion there is no better way than interact with your guests/customers to get feedback, although this is not always possible. I think it's important to create a company culture where feedback is always welcome (whether bad or good), actively sought and acted upon.
I am all for using mystery shoppers as well as they keep staff on their toes and provide unvaluable feedback, although I find forms a bit limitative.
I was told of a michelin star restaurant where all staff were given an allocation to visit competitor restaurants as too many times only managers and chefs can expense those visits. I think it's important to emphasise that staff are sent/given the opportunity to visit competitors not too criticise them on their return but too find out what they do differently and/or better than us.
"I guess what I'm really trying to find are very practical, simple actions that can be taken to see through the eyes of the customer. Ultimately the best way to find out what customers want is is to ask them, I suppose. But how can operators engage with their audience in an insightful way without being intrusive?"
I used to have disagreements about this with my GM and that's exactly why I will no longer work for large companies: common sense is not in their SPI/SOP of whatever other names they are given. Sure at Wagamama they will ask you every single time how your food is, but they do it in a way that's not personable. Hospitality is an art, something you do with passion and care. So you find the right time to speak to your guests and you invite your team to do the same. For example in a restaurant and ideal time is (in a case of a couple dining) when one goes to the toilet.
I could go on forever, bit I think I made my point
The only way to develop and grow is to listen to what customers are saying and act on it.
We encourage all staff when interacting with customer's during their stay, to ask the question "what could we be doing to improve your stay/experience"? This encourages customers to mention that dripping tap etc.
Following their stay, customers are e-mailed and asked for their feed back.
Social Media also provides a useful monitor of guest experience.
Anthony Lloyd
Fallowfields Hotel and Restaurant, Oxfordshire
www.fallowfields.com
Have a vision or aspiration is mind for your guests experience and then seek as many ways as you can to be able to gauge your performance against that.
Everyone can walk the floor with their eyes open watching and talking to guests - there is no benefit being locked away back of house. Watch facial expressions and engage guests in discussions from which you can illicit what they enjoyed and what might exceed their expectations.
In addition there are a variety of other ways to gather feedback:
Watching social media and engaging guests who comment via this medium in discussion
Using post experience surveys with existing guests - whether online or paper based these provide additional feedback. Our advice is to ensure you ask the right questions. Guests do not measure their experience in terms of brand standard adherence so explore the emotional side. There are a wide range of companies who can provide such services all of which are valuable but who ever you are considering I recommend someone who can take the pain of objective analysis away for you. The last thing operators should be doing is trying to find the time to collate and analyse this data. Operators require information and intelligence not loads of data.
Use mystery guests one of the advantages here is that they provide a fresh pair of eyes - they are typically not your existing guests and you get the feedback no matter what the experience is. A criticism of trip advisor and other existing guest based surveys is that you may only be getting the good and the bad as they are the ones most motivated to comment - ambivalence does not provide a great deal of motivation and you have no idea how representative the views you get actually are. While mystery guests are more limited in volume terms they are (as long as you ask the right questions) a valuable part of the feedback loop.
Read! whether books, reports or research - it all helps unpick what matters
Having a vision and then aligning all feedback mechanism to explore your progress against the experience you want guests to have is helpful. Getting intelligence not just a mass of data with some headline scores is vital.
Reward and recognise and encourage team members to engage guests to learn more adding to the pot of knowledge.
Finally simply measuring yourself against yourself is of limited value. The reason we developed Customer Service Benchmarking was to provide the benchmarking based intelligence that could help those that aspire to improve their customer service. Whether you use us to help with online surveys or mystery guest based intelligence or not - somehow get feedback - understand what the guests feel.
Our findings demonstrate that most are not good enough at satisfying or exciting guests and there are distinct differences sub sector to sub sector and competitive set to competitive set with the vast majority failing to deliver experiences that generate recommendation.
We will be delighted to share our FREE insight report into the State of Customer Service in the Hospitality Sector with you when we release it next month - just let us have your details at: www.customerservicebenchmark.com - you will also be able to play with the questions we know work.
One final point - no one I know has ever left a hospitality establishment and recommended a business because they always go a great table check - emotions matter - emotions drive value - not everything that can be measured matters! We know that personality matters - without personality hospitality establishments are simply expensive vending machines.
What a great post, outlining succinctly the various feedback processes. I agree with them all, but there is one that stands out for me and where 99.99% of one's feedback should come from and that is, and I quote "engage guests in discussions from which you can illicit what they enjoyed and what might exceed their expectations".
For me this is the absolute crux, the key to obtaining really useful feed back. If you understand what will exceed guest expectations [and very often this are so simple to achieve] it becomes easy to deliver that little wow which sets your business apart.
Engaging guests in such discussion, also creates a business personality - which the following line encapsulates perfectly - "without personality hospitality establishments are simply expensive vending machines".
Thank you Anthony
I also agree that the brand development opportunity should not be under estimated. Every team member who engages and develops a relationship with guests is developing the brand - articulating and demonstrating the points of differentiation and passively challenging the guests to look at others establishments more closely in the future.