Listening to guests is a core tenet of building a great business. In fact, listening to your guests is often the first step in creating a business. The same applies once an establishment is up and running. Continuously keeping a finger on the pulse of your guests’ needs is critical to maintaining and growing the success of any brand.
Guests understand this as well. In fact, research has shown that most consumers actually have a strong desire to be listened to and be made a part of the brands that they support. This is commonly done through guest feedback surveys, with millions completed each year. In 2012, Empathica processed over 30 million of them alone.
So, brands want to listen to their guests, and guests want to provide feedback to brands, it should be simple. Brands ask the questions and consumers respond, right? Not so fast…
The Rise of Social Feedback
The challenge is that the traditional guest feedback cycle is changing, making it increasingly difficult for brands to understand the nature of what exactly guests are thinking and feeling.
At one point in time guest feedback was very straightforward. Restaurateurs were a part of a local community and the owners, staff and guests knew each other on a first name basis. Giving feedback was as simple as having a personal conversation about the weekly specials or the new menu items that were soon to arrive.
As the restaurant base grew with the business, the personal conversations of the past evolved into more sophisticated but still reasonably straightforward comment cards and eventually online guest surveys. The feedback wasn’t quite as personal due to the structured nature of the responses but the results were easy to understand when given the appropriate tools. Brands were able to ask direct questions to glean insights such as “My guests like these menu items.” or “My guests feel the decor and layout are outdated.”
Today, the fastest growing channels of feedback are social media and social review sites, which have created an explosion of new sources of guest feedback. This feedback is coming at a fast and furious pace, and is often completely unsolicited, creating unique challenges for business owners and operators when it comes to understanding it and, more importantly, interpreting what to actually do about it to improve the guest experience (see Figure 1).
Figure 1. Changing dynamics in customer feedback
Social Media is Changing Guest Behavior
According to Nielsen’s Global Trust in Advertising report – which surveyed more than 28,000 Internet respondents in 56 countries – 92% of consumers say they trust earned media, such as recommendations from friends and family, above all other forms of advertising—an increase of 18 percent since 2007.
Figure 2
Clearly the feedback and commentary being generated in social media is influencing and changing guest behavior. Empathica’s Consumer Insights research, as seen in Figure 2, supports Nielsen’s findings with 3 out of 4 respondents indicating that social media comments and reviews were influencing their restaurant dining decisions. Perhaps more interestingly, the same study showed that half of the respondents used social media as a primary source for discovering and trying new brands.
The above is an excerpt from Empathica’s latest whitepaper “Driving Action with Social Media Buzz: Turning Guest Feedback into Exceptional Guest Experiences.” To learn how social media is changing guest behaviour and how your restaurant brand can combine survey and social feedback to drive action, download the full whitepaper.