Combine Surveys and Social Feedback to Drive Action
Driving the right kind of business changes to reflect constantly evolving guest sentiment requires a consolidated view across all actionable feedback guests are providing you. This means leading the guest conversation by asking the appropriate questions via a guest experience survey while also following trends that may be hidden in the buzz of naturally occurring online conversations.
In a practical sense, how is this accomplished and what does it look like?
Lead the Conversation (Structured Survey Feedback)
When it comes to surveys, the feedback you get from guests is only as valuable as the questions you ask them. The challenge with gathering the right kinds of data and insights from guest feedback is asking the right questions in the first place — questions that are reflective of your brand and accurately capture the brand experience you strive to deliver. Subtle changes in wording and structure can have a big impact, especially when it comes to driving the focused actions and behaviors that lead to a great guest experience. Oftentimes this requires going beyond generic functional questions to those that are more nuanced emotional questions that seek to differentiate the experience from like competitors.
Pointed questions can get to the heart of what you are doing right and what you are doing wrong. These types of questions provide specific, structured feedback that provides brands and locations with valuable analytical insight into guest feedback. This pool of structured feedback can be applied against various algorithms to produce a wide variety of specific performance scores, which can act as a baseline to measure past success and forward- looking performance targets.
Follow the Buzz (Unsolicited Feedback)
In contrast to the structured data provided by guest surveys, unstructured text comments can provide a qualitative view into guest sentiment. On the surface, these qualitative comments may appear more difficult to decipher than structured scored data. However, by applying appropriate analytical tools, these guest comments may uncover upcoming or unseen trends before the structured feedback is given. These guest comments can serve to validate scored data by providing additional qualitative insight.
Understanding these comments takes more than just reading through them one by one though. Natural language processing tools help to decipher what is happening across the full spectrum of feedback by categorizing and analyzing what topics are being discussed, which topics are most positive or negative and what co-occurring topics are being mentioned together.
Don’t Just Treat the Symptoms, Cure the Disease
Combining structured and unstructured feedback provides brands with a comprehensive qualitative and quantitative view into guests’ perceptions.
This consolidated view of unstructured feedback combined with scored data and text analytics gives a brand strategic perspective on how they are performing, where they may be able to improve and the direction their guests’ expectations may be headed.
With social media feedback in particular there is often a temptation to simply read and react to individual negative mentions. While this is a valuable activity to help diffuse specific guest issues, this strategy does not facilitate the type of ongoing, strategic changes that will improve the guest experience over time.
A view across all feedback streams allows for a much more proactive analytical view of the experience, effectively allowing a brand to “cure the disease rather than treat the symptoms”. It’s this combination of both qualitative survey and quantitative comment feedback that can lead to informed decisions to improve the guest experience. This comprehensive view of guest feedback, alongside a deep understanding of the model of a brand’s loyalty, is the key to unlocking the science behind why guests choose to return regularly and act as brand advocates.
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.