Social media and review sites are changing the importance of developing satisfied guests, and responding to guest needs. In today’s world of mass commoditization and information overload, consumers are looking for reliable information when making decisions on products, services, retailers, restaurants, resorts, hotels, airlines, and anything else where there is a considered purchase. We consumers crave experiential feedback – what do people like me actually think? How did they rate the experience? In fact, in many cases, people will find out more about the reviewer to implicitly accept, reject, or weight their opinion accordingly. Is the rater active in the category? Are they experts? Are they always negative?
The statistician in me has concerns about the entire genre of quantifiable feedback online from a non-random sample of guests, some with time available to get extremely detailed, with little tangible benefit other than contributing to the common good. Not a bad phenomenon, and I wholeheartedly support people providing real value at little cost to make the world a better place. It’s the statistical reliability I have concerns about. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, not too many people are worried about the Rukstales statistical reliability concerns. The feedback highlights several valuable points. The first is, so what. The reviews are what they are, and if someone has lousy service, or several people do, that is the truth coming out from the experience. The second point is that, to a customer, every company needs to be satisfying the needs of everyone. There is little wiggle room, no tolerance of lack of adherence to standards, no excuse for not accommodating all reasonable requests. You never know if that customer is going to be sharing online.
Remember when. Guest satisfaction used to be the domain of the operations or marketing, or ignored completely as long as seats are filled in the restaurant and the register’s ringing. When a “study” was done, it required contracting with a research company or freelancer, identifying an expensive sample, and asking 20 pages of detailed questions. For restaurants, it would include everything from the greeting of the hostess to the color of the drapes, from the presentation of the food, enough cherries in the drink, to the volume of the music. In other categories, the study would have equal depth in areas of product features and benefits, competitive rankings, and customer service evaluations (how long do you think you were on hold?).
Along came study after study saying that only “top box” (say, a 5 on a 5 point scale) of satisfaction mattered. Net Promoter Score is a variant that uses an 11 point scale, and penalizes for poor scores. It has the added simplicity of being a single question. All of these findings led to a goal of simplifying the effort, but the goal of root causation – what makes a satisfied customer – remains.
The next brainchild of the industry is to drive customers to the web to complete a survey by printing out a website on the bottom of the receipt, and providing a sweepstakes or reward for actually filling out the survey. Really? Who does this? I’m not a fan nor a practitioner of this feedback mechanism, but the analyst in me questions the self-selection bias and the accuracy of their input if it’s for a pure reward (gamers only?). I could make the case that some trending over time could be useful, if it’s not a ton of noise statistically. However, we worked with a restaurant client that, despite all of their efforts, only received 50 or so responses a month. At this level, it would take about a year to get enough sample to glean even a simplistic understanding of satisfaction, and leaves us with no trending or sense of improvement to changes, since the sample is too insensitive to provide any reliable data.
Does this sound familiar? Have you struggled with getting enough responses, in a timely manner, to understand your business? Are you getting a mixed bag of reviews online and need to figure it out? Are customers and guests really experiencing interactions with you and your brand that are as you envisioned, or do you have operational issues that need to be confronted? Are there menu items that should be dropped? Added?
We’ve tackled these issues for restaurants, and have six proven principles in a single process that, when used together, connect guest satisfaction, restaurant profitability, and company growth. If you would like to learn more, sign up for the Segmentology ® Report, our thought leadership newsletter. To receive our upcoming issue that will be addressing the six principles and processes that allow you to pay attention and drive improvements to satisfaction, click here.
