Are you collecting feedback from your guests regularly? If so, have you noticed that that has become such a vital component of your business’s ongoing success? And if not, you might not even know what you’re missing. Even in a small operation where you feel you can see everything, hearing it from your guest’s perspective can change how you manage the experience and improve your business regularly.
If you aren’t currently collecting guest feedback, here are the benefits that you are missing out on.
- Waiting until it shows up online is expensive. Not only that, but it can ruin your reputation. Suppose one negative review can turn away up to 30 prospective visitors. In that case, there are many potential revenue losses that could have been avoided by collecting guest feedback and learning about necessary issues before they turned into an online review.
- It can be correlated to team member performance. When employees know that guests are prompted for their thoughts, their performance naturally rises. There has been substantial research conducted on this subject, known as the Hawthorne Effect, which directly correlates employee performance with feedback from customers or guests.
- It’s an excellent recognition tool for positive behavior. When you reward your employees for doing their jobs with enthusiasm, the positive behavior is known to continue. The best way to be made aware of this behavior is through feedback when guests comment on positive aspects of their experience and call out your employees by name.
- It’s an unbiased perspective that helps you coach your employees. When employees are underperforming, you may observe it and call them out on it, but that message can be even more impactful to paying guests. This allows you to coach employees when they fall below the standard and provide a poor experience that is reflected in guest feedback.
- It provides you with the intelligence you need to make operational improvements. Once you have addressed guest feedback with your employees (both positive and negative), you now have the data that you need to fix more significant issues within your organization. Especially when you’ve identified multiple instances of the same complaint, you have greater justification for making necessary changes.
- Your culture depends on it. By recognizing employees for positive behavior, coaching employees for falling below the standard, and making long-term fixes that improve the guest experience for the future, your culture can thrive. These changes won’t be made without guest feedback, employees won’t have as much support from their leaders, and the guest experience deteriorates.
- Feedback is critical to creating advocates and driving positive word of mouth. If negative reviews can destroy your reputation, positive reviews can turbocharge it. When you collect feedback internally, you can segment your guests into promoters and detractors, which allows you to send your promoters to your favorite review sites. With the level of influence, that review sites have on purchase decisions, encouraging your most satisfied guests to post online is necessary for the health of your business.
- It provides you with the opportunity to recover from service failures. One of the best ways to build a strong relationship with your guests is to resolve issues when they arise. Suppose you determine who your detractors are through private feedback. In that case, you can continue the conversation with them before they turn into online reviews and walk them through the process of service recovery.
- It gives you the agility to make changes in real-time. It’s one thing to make small changes at the end of the month, but another thing to make adjustments during your operating day that will show their worth on the same operating day. For instance, if a restroom needs attention and you learn about it the next day, the damage has already been done. But if you can dispatch a team member to clean it right when the feedback comes in, fewer guests will be negatively impacted.
Are you leveraging each of these benefits, or are you missing out on ways to improve your business and the relationships with your guests?
To learn more about ROLLER’s Guest Experience Score, click here.
