"You need to make sure that you are aware when an experience becomes negative and take immediate steps to start correcting it." - CA
Over the past five months I have been working for a local restaurant here in Seattle. During this time period, I feel like I have learned an enormous amount about customer service, a value that is important to all businesses but crucial in the restaurant industry.
What has been really fun for me, though, is to think about customer service and how it can be improved through the integration of new technologies.
I ask people everyday, "How is everything tasting?" which normally garners the responses "Wonderful", "Delicious", or "Good" and on rare occasions, "over/undercooked" or "lacks flavor". That said, it is my job as a server to assess customer responses and really determine if my customers are satisfied with their experience or not.
Normally, I feel like I do a pretty good job of analyzing my tables. Verbal and physical queues help substantially, however, there are occasions when I simply cannot tell if a customer being upfront about how they feel about their experience.
Personally, I understand why people might hesitate. When I go out to restaurants, I hate complaining or sending things back. I might be intimidated by the server. I might not want to complain in front of the other guests at my table. Or in the worst scenarios, I might just hope that the situation blows over and my party and I can go back to enjoying our evening.
I know, these are all awful ways of dealing with a problem. But I see it everyday. And unfortunately, for the restaurant, if a person has a bad experience that is not address, be it the restaurants fault or the customers, the customer are most likely going to associate that bad experience with the restaurant and in turn make sure that friends, families, online communities, etc know that they have a negative view of the restaurant.
People who deal with issues at restaurant as I have described above don't understand that great restaurants want to hear about any issues their customers have. They don't want you to fester on them because they want the opportunity to resolve them. They want people to leave their restaurants satisfied.
In my opinion, for restaurants at least, communication (surprise, surprise) is where customer service gets tied up.
Enter the mobile web.
With services like Twitter, Facebook and other social feedback sites, customers are able in real-time to give their opinion about something. Although this can be negative at times, giving an opinion online is often less intimidating because there are less personal consequences in doing so. I think while that might change (soon people might expect businesses to be online and listening online), for now people don't expect anyone to be listening.
And that is exactly where the opportunity is. A restaurant that is a little more tech-savvy can follow real-time feedback on a mobile phone or desktop computer. If any of their customers have, mobile phones and twitter accounts and end up commenting on dinner, a manager will be able to see the comment whenever it is posted. If the comment is posted at any point during the dinner, it gives the manager an option to react to that comment.
Taking it a step further, if restaurants made their customers aware of their presence online, then maybe it would entice customers to comment even more. You could even offer up specific hashtags for people to use when commenting on their experience and thus limiting the noise that might not be as relevant to the manager.
I think this could help restaurants address some of the feedback and issues people encounter at their restaurant before that negative review is posted on yelp.com or before a comment is made to another potential customer about how bad their experience was at X restaurant.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment