Customer feedback is a crucial part of improving any restaurant's food and service experience. With clear feedback, you can identify your venue's shortcomings and strengthen what makes your business unique and popular with your diners.
However, many restaurants do not have a proactive approach to getting customer feedback consistently. This leads to limited data for improvement, and can negatively affect service quality and customer satisfaction.
In this guide, we’ll explain why customer feedback is so vital, and give you six ways to effectively gather customer feedback in your restaurant.
Some of the major reasons customer feedback is important to a restaurant include:
Customer feedback can take on many forms, each offering unique insights and benefits:
The more customer feedback you collect, the more data you have to improve your restaurant. Here are 6 ways to solicit feedback in your restaurant.
If you have put the right processes in place, gaining in-person feedback can be seriously valuable in your business.
Some tactics you can use to encourage feedback include:
It may also be beneficial to have a suggestions or comments box as an additional way to get more feedback about your business from customers who may feel less comfortable giving it in person.
In-person feedback is valuable because of how frequently you can gather it. Everyone who enters your business has thoughts and feelings about it. By gathering in-person feedback, you ensure these insights aren’t wasted.
In-person feedback also enables you to have a dialogue. You can ask follow-up questions to get the most valuable feedback for you.
Inconvenience often prevents customers from giving valuable feedback. Customers may have to log into their Google account or review platforms, go out of their way to write a note for a suggestion box or feel uncomfortable giving honest feedback directly to staff.
By having a tablet for customer feedback on standby when your customers pay the bill, you can ensure quick and easy reviews for your business in a way that won’t inconvenience your diners or your front-of-house staff. These feedback systems can often be built into your POS system.
A tablet review also allows you to write your own survey questions to direct feedback. With exact questions, you can precisely confirm if multiple customers have the same pain points, and gain complete oversight over your business.
QR codes can be placed around key points of your business to encourage dine-in guests to quickly scan them and fill out a feedback form. QR codes for feedback specifically should be separate from a menu code or other services, and they should be clearly labelled for convenience.
QR codes are a great way to encourage customer feedback. This gives more reserved guests a chance to provide feedback without the discomfort that might come with a face-to-face interaction. With anonymity, QR codes make it easier to gather genuine negative feedback and drive further improvement across your restaurant.
To encourage guests to scan in QR codes more often, you should consider offering incentives for giving reviews, such as gift vouchers and special deals. However, to use this tactic, you must ensure any incentives you offer do not contravene the rules of any review platforms that your QR code links to.
By following up with your customers after dining, you are encouraging more reviews and building a better relationship with that customer at the same time. A follow-up message offers unique opportunities to engage with guests, encourage repeat business and develop a loyal customer base.
With ResDiary’s built-in email marketing features, you can automatically send follow up email messages to your customers immediately after they’ve dined. This helps you gather actionable feedback while the experience of your restaurant is still fresh in your diner’s minds.
With ResDiary’s Silverstreet integration, you can also send follow-up messages via text. Like other forms of feedback, these methods are a good opportunity to encourage feedback while offering incentives such as gift vouchers.
You can accompany your request for feedback with special deals to drive repeat business. You can easily offer these deals by incorporating ResDiary promotions in your email marketing.
By offering these deals in conjunction with a request for feedback, you show customers that you value their thoughts about your restaurant, and offer them a great-value opportunity to return to your business. In combination, it’s an excellent way to drive repeat business.
Another way to get more customer feedback is through full sit-down interviews. These provide an opportunity to get extremely in-depth insights from your customers.
It’s important that you offer something to entice customers into spending the time and effort a longer interview will require. Incentives can include entering a draw for a reward, gift vouchers or merchandise.
For a customer interview to be effective, it is important to select the right customers to speak to. Be sure you have a proper cross-section of your diners. Use your understanding of your restaurant demographics and booking data to find the guests with the right expertise.
If a customer has a history of providing genuine and helpful responses, both positive and negative, they could also be the perfect candidate for an interview.
You’ll also need to carefully prepare for customer interviews. Come up with a list of questions that will ensure you get the most valuable insights.
With customer relationship management solutions like Acteol and Nollie, as well as ResDiary’s built-in analytics suite, you can gather comprehensive data about your diners. This helps you find the right customers for these interviews quickly and easily.
It’s important to monitor your reviews and social media mentions for further insights or points you can act on. It’s likely that customers have already shared plenty of feedback for you to explore. There are also plenty of benefits to driving more reviews for your restaurant.
Driving more social media reviews and interactions helps more customers find your business and can be vital to growing your online presence. Some ways to increase your brand’s online presence through reviews and social media are:
With ResDiary’s Meta Integrations, you can maximise your social media campaigns and enable customers to book a reservation directly from Instagram or Facebook.
Check out our guides to digital marketing for restaurants and how to use social media as a hospitality venue for more information.
Once you have an overview of your customers’ feedback, it is time to apply it to your business. Take your weak points and find ways to improve on them.
With ResDiary’s table management software and quality integrations, you can improve your business for greater guest satisfaction by:
ResDiary’s integrated services give you the tools you need to transform your customers’ feedback into actionable data you can use to streamline your daily operations and gain more glowing reviews.
From gathering booking data to streamlining daily operations to give your staff more time to focus on customer experience, we can help you improve your business and encourage more positive reviews.
Improve your business today by booking a demo with ResDiary.