4 Reasons Your Restaurant Should be Collecting Customer Feedback

For anyone running a business, ensuring customers are satisfied and maintaining a strong brand reputation is of utmost importance. With customer feedback you’ll understand guest behaviours and satisfaction levels, allowing you to deliver excellent customer service. Remember as your products evolve so will the way your customers interact with your brand, so gathering customer feedback should evolve with this.

In this blog, we’ll explore 4 reasons why your restaurant should be collecting customer feedback, as well as how you can gather these valuable insights.

The benefits of customer feedback in restaurants

1. Better insights into your audience

Customers already expect businesses to pre-empt their needs, with 70% of consumers admitting they’re more likely to purchase exclusively from brands that understand them. 

While you may already have an idea of what your customers like, obtaining customer feedback can give you valuable insight into how they truly think, feel and behave. This allows you to tailor menu items and service standards to meet your customer's expectations. This will help to attract and retain customers and boost profits. 

2. It encourages teams to develop their skills

Did you know that 85% of people are willing to provide feedback if they’ve had a good experience and 81% if they had a bad experience? This highlights that when you give customers the opportunity to provide feedback, they’re likely to take you up on the opportunity. This can supply great insight into your team’s performance, allowing you to spot any positive and negative trends that may be impacting your business. 

When sending out surveys, you can ask questions about staff friendliness, wait times and performance. This can be used to enhance staff productivity, skill levels and customer experience. 

3. It helps you improve your products and services

Identifying pain points within your menu allows you to understand exactly what dishes need improving and how. This valuable feedback ensures that you make data-driven changes that enable you to make the best decisions for your restaurant.

Survey responses can give insight into how your current prep processes or service standards are falling short, allowing you to make decisions that are more likely to receive positive sentiment from guests. For example, if you’re continually receiving complaints about service time taking too long during busy periods you can make changes to rotas to ensure enough staff are available during those periods.

Identifying and making simple changes can have a huge impact on guest satisfaction, profits and overall efficiency within your restaurant. Remember, work smarter, not harder!

4. It helps you start conversations with unsatisfied customers

Research shows that 83% of customers agree that they feel more loyal to a brand if they respond to and resolve their complaints, highlighting the importance of getting reviews, even if they’re negative. 

It can often be difficult or uncomfortable starting conversations with disgruntled customers, however using surveys could be an ideal way to navigate the situation while still gaining invaluable information. Even making the most granular changes can help you make a huge difference to customer expectations and experience. 

Understanding the importance of feedback from customers

Customer data is like gold dust, but only if it’s collected and analyzed properly. Even if there are several factors causing restaurants to struggle, customer feedback can help future-proof and offset some of the challenges you’re currently facing. 

Customer feedback can be easily and effectively implemented into operational changes, menu adjustments, staff training, and services to improve overall business processes. Senior leadership level positions can easily introduce customer feedback platforms like Yumpingo into restaurants helping to drive the importance of utilizing customer feedback throughout the whole business.

"Customer feedback is one of the most powerful tools a restaurant has. It gives restaurants real-time insight into what guests love and what could be better, helping them fine-tune the experience and make continuous improvements. When restaurants truly listen and act on feedback, they build stronger relationships with their guests, improve their reputation, and keep people coming back for more!"

Carrie Carder - Customer Success Manager

How to get feedback from customers 

Various customer feedback methods can be used to gather guest insights, such as:

• Customer satisfaction surveys.
• Word of mouth. 
• Social posts.
• Analyzing calls.
• Reviews on sites like Trip Advisor.

Customer feedback surveys are usually the preferred form of collecting feedback, as they can be sent by email within an hour of a customer’s visit or completed immediately in the restaurant. Structured customer feedback questions that dig a little deeper into your guest’s experience can be asked.

Having the ability to ask questions as close as possible to the time your guests dined in your restaurant allows you to obtain more accurate feedback. This means data-driven decisions can be made that improve guest experiences and maintain your brand reputation. 

At Yumpingo, our Customer Experience Management Platform can help you do just that. Our platform can seamlessly integrate with your POS systems, where team members collect customer insights through tablets and emails. 

We’ll also calculate NPS (Net Promoter Score) and sentiment scores, to give you data-driven insights that will help you improve your customer service and overall business operations. These insights could relate to:

• How good each dish was. 
• Whether their server was friendly/knowledgeable/attentive. 
• How their overall experience was.
• The cleanliness and ambiance of the restaurant. 

This data can be used to amend or remove dishes from your menu, implement new cleaning processes, or improve server attributes and guest satisfaction.

To learn more about how we calculate these scores, read our blog about guest sentiment and NPS. 

Customer feedback examples

All customer feedback can differ. Here are a few examples:

Example 1:

Question: How was your food today?

Answer: I absolutely loved the food and am so happy that there was a great choice of gluten-free menu items. When visiting other restaurants I can find it difficult to find meals I actually want to eat, so it was a nice change to find something I really liked.

Example 2:

Question: How did you find the service today?

Answer: I didn’t book in advance so I was worried that I might not be able to get a table, but we were seated right away. Anna was really friendly and we didn’t have to wait a long time for our food.

Example 3:

Question: How did you find the atmosphere of the restaurant today?

Answer: We came during a busy period, which caused service to be slow and when our food arrived it was cold. I complained to my server and the manager and still feel extremely disappointed by this service. 

While we all aim to receive positive customer feedback, it can’t always be achieved. For guidance on how to navigate difficult or negative customer feedback, read our blog.

How Yumpingo can help you collect customer feedback

At Yumpingo we understand that it can be difficult to know which customer feedback tools you should be using to wade through the data you collect. That’s why our Customer Experience Management Platform is here to help you collect the right customer feedback data that makes a difference to your restaurant. 

To learn more about how we can help you collect customer feedback that enhances guest satisfaction, get in touch with us today or book a demo.