“Sherlock Holmes” on the importance of data

Arthur Conan Doyle, author of Sherlock Holmes had it right when he said:

The Restaurant Report – Saving Customers and Revenue

Another post taken from our new blog for The Restaurant Report, found at www.therestaurantreport.wordpress.com

This presentation deals with the issue of losing a customer due to lack of feedback infrastructure, and what that will mean in terms of lost revenue on an annual basis.

The Restaurant Report

The Restaurant Report is an exciting business information and marketing tool developed by True North Metrics with the needs of the average restauranteur in mind.

Performance benchmarking, Customer & Employee feedback and Customer engagement are now within reach of any restaurant owner with The Restaurant Report.

Check out the video below for more information and take a look at our great The Restaurant Report blog @ www.therestaurantreport.wordpress.com

SMS Marketing – Pizza time!

It seems that the good folk at Pizza Hut are continuing their foray into the mobile marketing space in the US with the commencement of some SMS engagement initiatives. Recently the Global pizza giant used SMS marketing to generate buzz about its new Hershey’s Dunkers offering and consequently built a mobile database of consumers to remarket to.

Television adverts included a call to action for customers to text the keyword HUT to short code 269411. Consumers who texted in were entered for a chance to win a Pizza Hut pizza, once a month, for a year straight.

A marketing executive involved with the campaign stated how she was impressed with the medium’s ability to connect with Pizza Hut’s key demographics, they used “TV spots to promote their new product, and at the end of the spot, they promoted the mobile call-to-action with an awesome sweepstakes attached”

“The combination of mobile and the sweepstakes offer of free pizza for a year proved to be an unbeatable combination,” she said. “The results were outstanding, and more than enabled the client to build a vast mobile database which they could use for future marketing.”

The campaign has proved immensely successful and in just two weeks the campaign has received more than 2,000 opt-ins and 54 percent moved on to double-opt-in.

Consumers who texted in received the following message: “Congrats! You are NOW entered 2 Win a free 1 topping pizza every month for a year from Pizza Hut! Winner notified via phone call on 8.23.09.”

Participants were then sent a confirmation and a chance to double-opt-in: “Reply YES Now for 10 more entries to WIN & to get Xclusives from Pizza Hut. max4msgs/mo. std txt rts apply. Reply YES Now!”

The final message said, “Success! You are subscribed! STOP 2 quit. HELP 4 help. Std msg chrgs apply. Look 4 exclusives on your Mobile Phone!”

Pizza Hut really seem to be making great inroads into usage of mobile marketing, and this example in particular would make interesting reading for Irish Pizza retailers like 4star and Apache.

Customer Feedback – Part 3: Barriers to feedback

Continuing on from part 1 and part 2

We don’t live in a perfect world – low Customer Feedback

Unfortunately this perfect world doesn’t exist, and instead restaurants are forced to operate in somewhat of an information vacuum caused by customers’ lack of inclination to speak up when they are dissatisfied. Customers are notoriously tight lipped when it comes to giving feedback, conservative estimates claim that 95% of dissatisfied customers will not voice their issues to the business involved. However this silence is most certainly not upheld once they leave the four walls of the restaurant in question. Around 90% of these unhappy customers will proceed to tell their friends and family about the experience, spreading negative WOM about your business, and decreasing your chance of attracting new customers.

So why do is it so hard to obtain customer feedback? The problem is caused by two major areas: cultural norms and lack of feedback infrastructure.

• Cultural Norms – Some cultures find it much more acceptable to complain than others, for example customers in Ireland seem willing to “put up” with major shortcomings in service levels at the point of interaction with a business, however once they have left the premises will proceed to tell their mother, brother and anyone who is willing to give them a sympathetic ear. However in other cultures people are much less willing to endure anything they consider to be below par service and will complain accordingly without flinching.

• Feedback Infrastructure – The second part of the problem is lack of infrastructure in the complaint process. Many customers who might have complained or given feedback are put off by poor feedback infrastructure, either they don’t know how to give feedback, or they do know but perceive doing so to be too much effort. The “voice of the customer” is out there, it’s just not being captured

Shifting cultural norms and changing the way that customers think and feel about feedback is not in the scope of many businesses, cultural change is a long term goal that must be worked on by all stakeholders in the services industry.

However the aspect which businesses are in control of, and is an altogether more realistic goal, is ensuring that adequate feedback infrastructure is in place to ensure optimal feedback levels are attained. It must be made abundantly clear to customers how to give feedback, and it must be made as easy as possible to do so.

In the final section about Customer Feedback we will look at how True North Metrics can help businesses overcome these issues.

Performance measurement and control

SMS marketing – SMS is the “Killer App”

A short presentation on SMS Marketing and why iPhone applications aren’t all they are cracked up to be.

Customer Feedback – Part 2: Why things aren’t perfect

Carrying on from part 1 of our analysis of Customer Feedback issues found here

We don’t live in a perfect world – low Customer Feedback

Unfortunately this perfect world doesn’t exist, and instead restaurants are forced to operate in somewhat of an information vacuum caused by customers’ lack of inclination to speak up when they are dissatisfied. Customers are notoriously tight lipped when it comes to giving feedback, conservative estimates claim that 95% of dissatisfied customers will not voice their issues to the business involved. However this silence is most certainly not upheld once they leave the four walls of the restaurant in question. Around 90% of these unhappy customers will proceed to tell their friends and family about the experience, spreading negative WOM about your business, and decreasing your chance of attracting new customers.

So why do is it so hard to obtain customer feedback? The problem is caused by two major areas: cultural norms and lack of feedback infrastructure.

• Cultural Norms – Some cultures find it much more acceptable to complain than others, for example customers in Ireland seem willing to “put up” with major shortcomings in service levels at the point of interaction with a business, however once they have left the premises will proceed to tell their mother, brother and anyone who is willing to give them a sympathetic ear. However in other cultures people are much less willing to endure anything they consider to be below par service and will complain accordingly without flinching.

• Feedback Infrastructure – The second part of the problem is lack of infrastructure in the complaint process. Many customers who might have complained or given feedback are put off by poor feedback infrastructure, either they don’t know how to give feedback, or they do know but perceive doing so to be too much effort. The “voice of the customer” is out there, it’s just not being captured

Shifting cultural norms and changing the way that customers think and feel about feedback is not in the scope of many businesses, cultural change is a long term goal that must be worked on by all stakeholders in the services industry. However the aspect which businesses are in control of, and is an altogether more realistic goal, is ensuring that adequate feedback infrastructure is in place to ensure optimal feedback levels are attained. It must be made abundantly clear to customers how to give feedback, and it must be made as easy as possible to do so.

Part 3 will look at the solution to this problem

Customer feedback – Why we need to listen

Customer Feedback – Why we should listen & the perfect world

Customer feedback is of immense importance to every business. In this article, using restaurants as an example we will investigate the reasons why seeking feedback is so important and we will then imagine an ideal world where feedback flows from every interaction your customer has with your brand. 

Why listen?

Instinctively it may seem obvious that in order to better serve you customers you have to listen to what they have to say about your business, but it is worthwhile establishing exactly how listening to customer feedback can be beneficial.

• Preventing Negative Word of Mouth – Customers who encounter an issue with your product and service are very likely to spread negative word of mouth (WOM) about your restaurant. Marketing literature deals with this subject at length and ascribes varying degrees of seriousness to the problem of negative WOM, conservative estimates claim that an irate customer will tell ten people, however other marketers such as Pete Blackshaw estimate the number to be significantly higher as attested to in his book “Satisfied customers tell 3 friends, Angry customers tell 3,000” – and while this number may be slightly over enthusiastic, in this age of social networking sites and blogs news spreads far and wide.
• Making decisions based on evidence, rather than intuition - As basic as it may sound, if you do not fully understand what your customers’ needs and expectations are you cannot start to meet them (we often think we are doing this better than we are). All too often managers are tempted to base important decisions related to customer experience on, at best gut instinct, and at worst guesswork. Listening to your customers can help you collect evidence to guide your strategy going forward.
• Your customers are an invaluable source of ideas – Each one of your customers has a multitude of ideas about how to improve your food, your menu, your procedures and your business as a whole. Actively listening to customer feedback about your restaurant is of paramount importance if you intend to keep up with your customers’ demands. If you don’t meet them a rival restaurant will be more than happy to do so…

Imagine a perfect world… a customer feedback bonanza!

A wonderful information rich world where everyone who dined at your restaurant was willing and able to give you an open and honest appraisal about what they thought about the meal, the staff and the overall feel of the restaurant, decision making would be a whole different ballgame.

• Increased Service Recovery – It has been shown that if you are able to identify the customers who have had a bad experience at your restaurant, and rectify their problem with your service, they are much more likely return as a repeat customer to your restaurant than if you were to simply let them disappear into the night in a state of seething anger. This practice of incident identification and solution is known as Service Recovery. In fact research has shown that customers who have had their complaints met in a swift and mannerly fashion were actually inclined to spread POSITIVE WOM about what they perceived to be customer service “above and beyond” what is to be expected, in spite their initial problem with your service.
• Identify and fix the specific underlying problems – In a world where large numbers of your customer base were providing you with customer feedback of both a quantitative and qualitative nature you could measure, track and control various aspects of your business. Perhaps customers are fed up with the waiting time between courses, perhaps the standard of the waiting staff has dropped over the past few months. With adequate feedback you would have this information at your fingertips.
• Customer driven changes – Additions and alterations to the menu and changes to the service would be completely tailored to your customer base’s demands and would accurately reflect the “voice of the customer” matching exactly what they want and expect out of a dining experience at your restaurant.

In Part 2 we will look at why this doesn’t happen, and how we can fix this.

Mobile Marketing – Customer Engagement

See how SMS can be used for customer engagement.