Turning the Tables: Guest feedback

Guest feedback not only leads to simple restaurant operational fixes, it also tells you more about who your customers really are.

By Kate Leahy, Associate Editor -- Restaurants & Institutions, 2/1/2007

Kabuki Japanese Restaurant uses positive feedback to reward high performing stores. Au Bon Pain added more vegetarian soups to its menu in response to customer requests.

Listening to customer feedback can be as fun as taking medicine. But the payoff amounts to much more than a spoonful of sugar.

Thalia Loffredo thinks so. When the New York City restaurateur opened Jovia in the fall of 2005, she invited diners to don critics’ hats and fill out questionnaires to help her improve the new operation. She mailed $20 restaurant gift certificates to all who offered their address on the user-friendly form.

After compiling responses, Loffredo made important changes. She switched out the hip music at lunch for a softer sound, saving edgier tunes for dinner service. She worked with the chef to add a vegetable component to a bare-bones fish preparation. She installed a bright red awning over the front door after guests had trouble finding the restaurant. And she walked away with a brand-new guest database.

With this exercise early after the restaurant’s opening, Loffredo set a standard for acting on guest feedback. A valuable source of input, customer evaluation can guide menu changes, fine-tune service and décor and keep service in check. On a larger scale, it can help companies track brands and build guest databases. It can even establish stronger bonds between customers and operations.

Menu Focus

Many operators use feedback as a way to gauge the success of menu items. That’s the case at Arterra, a restaurant at the San Diego Marriott Del Mar Hotel that boasts a changing seasonal menu.

"Based on feedback, on a day-to-day basis we determine how long a dish will stay on the menu. Those guest comments have an effect on how and when we make those changes," says Joe Emma, assistant general manager of the hotel.

Sometimes the input prevents the kitchen from making any changes. When a popular grilled steak salad was removed from the lunch menu, "Our guests told us in no uncertain terms that they wanted it back," he says.

Boston-based Au Bon Pain also uses feedback primarily to gauge menu satisfaction. All customer menu comments are reviewed by the food-and-beverage department at weekly meetings. Guest comments revealed a surprising number of steak-salad loyalists among the chain’s customers. After receiving a number of complaints after removing a slower-selling steak-and-Gorgonzola salad from the menu, the fast-casual chain realized that while the salad didn’t show well in sales, it contributed significantly to customer satisfaction.

But the chain, with 120 company-owned stores, doesn’t act on every menu suggestion it receives. "You start with what your brand is. Is the feedback relevant to the brand or not? Clearly you can dismiss things that don’t make sense," says Ed Frechette, Au Bon Pain’s senior vice president of marketing.

Reality Checks

Feedback can be used to monitor customer brand awareness. Five years ago, Rock Bottom Brewery’s Director of Marketing Marilyn Davenport culled opinions from focus groups and customers to see how the Louisville, Colo.-based company’s namesake brand was aging. It revealed a couple of misunderstandings—few customers knew that Rock Bottom’s beer was brewed on site—but there also were welcome surprises. Many guests rated Rock Bottom’s food higher than pub fare, which was more than the chain was aiming for. Armed with consumer information, Davenport developed brand-appropriate promotional guidelines and training programs while the company expanded menu offerings to fit guest expectations. She’s gearing up to begin another brand review this year.

"Every once in a while, an operation has to take its pulse and make sure it’s on track," Davenport says. "It was a way for us to see where we needed to go in terms of growth and to better target our audience."

As a concept grows, feedback also can keep operators on top of details. At the nine-unit, Burbank, Calif.-based Kabuki Japanese Restaurant chain, Marketing Director Young Kim collects handwritten comment cards from each location that ask for a customer’s age and address so Kabuki can send them promotional material and gift certificates. While the comments are valuable, Kim also looks to the cards to analyze the demographic variances between restaurants.

Direct customer feedback also can reveal operational lapses. Kim recently received a call from a customer at a unit who complained that she wasn’t permitted to order kids menu items to go. Kim called the location and sorted through the misunderstanding with the manager who then gave the woman her requested takeout item. The glitch, which stemmed from inefficient to-go containers for kids’ items, was easily fixed. "We made adjustments. Right away we were able to figure it out. It took only two hours to make all the changes," Kim recalls.

Direct interaction between management and the guest also humanized the restaurant chain. "We want to be sure our customers know that we’re connected to them and that we want them to be heard," Kim says.

Helen Wechsler agrees. The director of dining services at Boston College in Chestnut Hill, Mass., believes that listening to students and staff enables her to stay connected with their wide-ranging needs. "I’d much rather hear the good and the bad than be in the dark and think everything is just great," she says.

Handwritten comment cards are replied to and posted in dining areas within two days while e-mails, which are sent directly to Wechsler’s inbox, are replied to quickly. Wechsler and her staff also daily check with students and staff in the dining facilities. Requesting feedback from students makes an especially valuable impact. "They’re not always used to being heard or responded to," Wechsler says.