Guests get their say quickly and easily with electronic aids - Part I
July 14, 2008
|
(July 14, 2008) Managers have told restaurant employees about customer calls of complaint or praise since the advent of the telephone, but new technology providing real-time distribution of call recordings is changing worker-coaching initiatives.
Dallas-based Cozymel’s Mexican Grill currently uses devices for on-table payment, multimedia promotions, entertainment and guest-surveying at a unit in Grapevine, Texas, and the chain plans to implement the technology at two additional branches.
“You can sit down with an employee and tell them about a problem, and they’ll say, ‘That didn’t happen,’” said Jerry Kenney, senior vice president of corporate operations for franchisor Papa Murphy’s International Inc. of Vancouver, Wash. PMI operates or franchises more than 1,000 Papa Murphy’s Take ‘N’ Bake Pizza restaurants in several states. Continuing, Kenney said of a recorded customer complaint or pat on the back, “When you can play it, that is powerful with the crew.”
“You can hear the emotion” in the caller’s voice, added Kevin O’Leary, another user of the technology. He is the managing partner of a franchised The Melting Pot fondue specialty restaurant owned by Chas & Chas Inc. in the Chestnut Hill area of Philadelphia. Because the call recording is delivered via e-mail or pulled from a website as an MP3-format file, “we can bring the laptop out [at employee meetings] and play it for the whole staff, and they can hear the emotion, too.”
Papa Murphy’s and the Chas & Chas Melting Pot both use the subscription-based guest feedback services of Salt Lake City-based Mindshare Technologies Inc., just one of several genres of customer-intelligence technologies now being tested or deployed by operators. Among the others:
In-restaurant hardware and software supporting guest self-surveys, such as that being used at the Grapevine, Texas, branch of nine-unit Cozymel’s Mexican Grill of Dallas, which soon will be added to two others.
Second-generation Web comment pages at the website of 52-unit Tumbleweed Southwest Grill of Louisville, Ky., www.TellTumbleweed.com , which management said has netted more than 6,000 customer exchanges since January 2007.
Mass electronic-survey results passed onto operators, including O’Leary of Chas & Chas, by providers of ancillary restaurant technology services. Notable among such service providers is the OpenTable.com online-reservations support group of San Francisco that earlier this year added a diner-feedback tool that already reportedly records more than 200,000 responses monthly.
Combinations of the tried-and-true e-mail marketing list and restaurant-level software for customer relationship management, or CRM, such as that in use at the 210-seat Corbin & Reynolds restaurant and bar in Long Beach, N.Y.
Kenney of Papa Murphy’s and O’Leary of the Chestnut Hill Melting Pot each indicated that perhaps the single most valuable aspect of the Mindshare technology relates to its ability to distribute in real time via e-mail or Web reports survey findings of interest to various headquarters, field and restaurant-level employees. But they noted that additional functions, such as automated protocols that require restaurant managers to acknowledge problems and report back on fixes and the distribution of recorded customer calls, greatly bolster the impact of research findings.
Back to OpenTable News
|
|