It’s no secret that the restaurant world is among the most competitive of all. Restaurants are constantly trying to out-innovate one another in order to establish a brand experience that stands out.
However, among the bustling and hustling, very often what moves the needle isn’t the next great marketing gimmick, but being able to identify the one thing in your existing operations that could be just a little better — the one thing that your guests care the most about.
This blog will shed light on why many restaurant owners and managers may be unaware of the hidden potential for improvement, along with how you can start to get closer to the truth.
“I feel like we should work on accuracy / speed of service / hospitality / etc. as our top priority.”
Does this sound like you?
During your operations meetings, you might hear such statements being thrown around as you try to figure out what the team should focus on to get guests to stick around and come back more often.
However, you’d be surprised at how often this statement is based on gut hunches (e.g. anecdotal feedback, surface-level observations, competitors’ latest move), without true data backing.
For example, are you able to answer this: if you reduce the wait time by 2 minutes, would your guest satisfaction improve by 2%? 5%? 10%? And would your revenue increase by 1%? 2%?
Without quantifiable proof, your next big priority might as well be a shot in the dark that could be leading the team down the wrong path.
Why this statement might be problematic:
Whether this sentiment is a result from your own observations, feedback from the team, or anecdotal reviews you come across on Yelp or Google, ultimately it’s not structured, detailed, and statistically significant data that paints the full picture.
What you need to backup that decision is high volume, granular, and direct feedback from guests — because that’s the single source of truth for any restaurant operation.
Not only is anecdotal information or angry reviews not representative of all guests, but it’s hard to prioritize what would most likely impact your guest satisfaction and revenue when there’s so much noise around.
How to turn this “I feel” into “I know”
Start collecting direct guest feedback using a CX platform. You might be wondering: Can I just use any sort of feedback form?
The answer is no. And here’s why.
First, your surveys need to be able to break down a guest experience by ordering channel, daypart, and operational category (e.g. food quality, accuracy, hospitality, speed of service etc.). This allows you to standardize what you are measuring across all your locations, and pinpoint exactly the area you need to improve on.
Next, you need copious amounts of guest feedback to reach statistical significance. We typically recommend that each restaurant location reach at least 20-30 feedback surveys submitted per month — although many can get up to 60 a day depending on their traffic. You can achieve this volumes by sending automatic survey emails post transaction through integrations (Tattle integrates with most restaurant techstacks out there.)
Lastly, you need an algorithm to help you digest this data and reveal your top improvement opportunity. Tattle does that with a proprietary algorithm, and automatically sets a monthly objective for each restaurant unit. That focuses each team on just one thing every month to achieve an 84% certainty of immediately improving the guest satisfaction within 30 days.
Conclusion
You might be thinking: “Wow! This sounds really sophisticated. How would I have time for that?”
Luckily, there’s a platform (and team!) that does it all for you. Whether you’re a 10-location brand or a 1,000-location brand, the Tattle platform automatically scales up your feedback collection and analysis, while our team gives every partner the one-on-one attention and insights presentation so you don’t have to dig into the dashboards.
You can check out this demo video to see how Tattle works in real life!
GUIDE: 17 Must-Have Metrics For Your Restaurants!
