Key Takeaways
- The customer experience is the be-all and end-all of restaurant brands, deserving of the highest priority and utmost care.
- Restaurant brands have lost significant time, money, and effort trying to piece together a suitable customer experience solution.
- Tattle has overcome the catastrophic deficits in the three primary feedback collection methods available in the market today.
Customer satisfaction is the lifeblood of each and every restaurant brand.
Without it, operations teams are left in the dark, executives can’t accurately assess the temperature of the brand, and future revenue will have an air of uncertainty.
Most restaurant brands collect enough feedback data to simply say ”we collect feedback data,” but not nearly enough by which to drive sound business decisions and improve the company overall.
Let’s take a closer look at three primary ways restaurant brands attempt to collect feedback data, the shortcomings by each, and the way Tattle addresses each of these.
1. Unintuitive Survey Experience
Over the last decade, a tiny message with a survey URL has appeared at the bottom of countless restaurant receipts.
As a consumer, it’s beyond cumbersome to manually type out a web address that’s 35 characters long while holding a flimsy, nearly-illegible receipt. And most of the time, restaurant brands are asking people to go through that process, along with a lengthy form, without any incentive.
This prevents helpful feedback, annoys the customer, and does nothing to stifle the negative feedback machine of social media review sites.
Secondarily, this method can also spur along issues within the business as well. Most of these traditional end-of-receipt survey requests come from legacy customer feedback management systems. These systems can be highly-antiquated and completely unintuitive, ultimately compounding feedback volume problems with operational complexities.
MOD Pizza, who moved away from this model and to the Tattle platform, said it bluntly: “We found that legacy survey platforms were too confusing and complex for our teams to use and understand.”
The Tattle Way
When properly incentivized with free sides, free desserts, or other customizable offers (of which only 4% of respondents actually use!) – along with a clean, user-friendly design – people are more likely to complete a longer survey. In fact, Tattle’s surveys collect over 50 data points from guests across all operational categories at ana verage 94.6% completion rate.
And, to the surprise of many, Tattle’s survey participation rate is a whopping 10% – over double the industry standard. Ultimately, restaurant brands see around 2,000% more feedback when using Tattle at their locations.
2. Improper Use Of Social Review Sites
In an ideal world, operations teams would never have to look at social media reviews for operational insight.
Ever.
Restaurant brands – through the marketing arm – should work to corral top fans and promoters to social media review platforms like Yelp, Google, and Facebook, while intercepting and managing as much negative feedback as possible internally.
Let’s face it, when people have a bad experience, they become emotional. In that process, a sense of objectivity is lost and they think less about helping the brand improve and more about preventing others from becoming customers.
While social media review sites can be useful for prospective buyers to gauge the overall customer experience at a given location, they provide little to no help internally with regard to improvement, lacking granularity and structure.
Ultimately, many brands have the opposite approach to the ideal – have operations use social media as an insights tool and forgo internal feedback collection.
The Tattle Way
Without a solid groundwork of private feedback, it’s nearly impossible to leverage social review sites to the fullest extent (which are fantastic marketing channels for brands on a per-location basis).
Because Tattle sends out its proprietary surveys automatically – through customer emails obtained through integrations with various POS, loyalty, ordering, and kiosk platforms – bad reviews are typically quashed before they make it to Yelp or Google.
When glowing, private feedback comes in from those ranking their experience five stars, they’re automatically sent an email incentivizing them to write a public review.
The Tattle platform brings about less bad reviews and more great reviews on social channels.
3. Ineffective In-House Solutions
Trying to cobble together a survey solution in-house has proven to be inefficient with brand resources and ineffective with regard to results. For example, many companies elect to have their tech-savvy employees in the marketing department build out some sort of survey system.
But two problems always come up. One, marketing is usually slammed, so asking them to build and maintain a complex array of forms and corresponding integrations can be taxing.
Second, if a survey process does get developed in-house, the logistical challenge of actually distributing it effectively bubbles up. And this is where often companies struggle the most.
“We couldn’t seem to get guests to fill out our form-based surveys, which severely limited our ability to improve,” said Arthur Sabedra, Director of Franchise Operations at The Halal Guys, regarding their feedback management experience before moving to Tattle.
On top of all of that – while a process can be made and a survey can be distributed – the project still risks collapse when it comes to UI and UX. If the survey-taking process isn’t user-friendly, submission rates will be dismal.
This is why in-house solutions rarely get it right, if ever.
The Tattle Way
The hard work has been done and the wheel doesn’t need to be reinvented.
The Tattle platform is able to accurately quantify the customer experience, maximize operational feedback, and drive improvements in guest satisfaction – all within an intuitive, yet powerful dashboard.
There is no longer a need to allocate massive amounts of internal resources to measuring customer satisfaction.
The Verdict
Restaurant brands see hundreds or thousands of people traversing their locations each and every day. With that, there is an unspoken expectation that operationally-useful feedback will follow – somehow, somewhere, or sometime.
But it doesn’t. It never does.
Brands have to employ a winning-strategy for collecting feedback in the digital age. And the half-hearted attempts to remedy the fact often end in things being more convoluted than they were originally.
Remove The Roadblocks
A decade ago was the time for slapping links at the bottom of purchase receipts or trying to conjure up a successful survey interface internally.
But not today.
Tattle eliminates each one of these roadblocks, streamlines customer experience management for restaurant operations, and much more.
Want more?
Watch a rapid demo of the Tattle platform!
