How Quick Service Restaurant Brands Can Drive Profitable Guest Experience Programs
Restaurants are losing some guests before they even walk in the door. So how can they gather the valuable guest feedback they need to attract new diners, satisfy regulars, and turn those negative reviews around? It’s not through guest satisfaction survey questions on a receipt, or a comment card box. Restaurants need to take a proactive approach to guest surveys by meeting diners when and where they’re ready to give feedback and allowing them to only answer questions relevant to their experience.
Many restaurants, including quick service restaurants (QSRs), are highly impacted by online reviews. As of last year, close to 214 million reviews have been posted to Yelp, and 45% of consumers say they’re likely to read a business’ reviews there before visiting. Meanwhile, nearly two-thirds (64%) of people now Google a business before visiting—and a whopping 94% say a negative review has caused them to avoid a business altogether.
Negative reviews (and word of mouth) can clearly cause quick service restaurants to lose some guests before they even walk in the door. So how can they stop those reviews before they’re even posted? With a proactive guest experience program that allows them to gather valuable guest feedback and then take the necessary action they need to attract new diners, satisfy regulars, and turn any potentially negative experiences into positive ones.
With this goal in mind, Pearl-Plaza gathered the three most important steps quick service restaurants can take to achieve better guest experiences in our new eBook, “How Food Services Brands Can Evolve Guest Experience Programs.” Here’s a short preview of what you’ll find inside.
3 Steps to a Future-Proof, Revenue-Driving Guest Experience Program for Quick Service Restaurants
Step #1: Create Operational Consistency
Operations are a critical part of your organization. It is also where many food service providers begin their overall quest to improve the guest experience and help answer questions like:
- How do I create a consistent experience between locations?
- How do I encourage and enforce positive behaviors in staff?
- How do I understand the overall experience guests are having with my brand?
Taking an operational approach is exactly what it implies: it helps food service providers understand where to make operational improvements that result in consistent experiences: clean bathrooms, tasty food, friendly service, and more.
When implementing an operational approach, look for solutions that help provide actionable guidance for employees and program managers with solutions like Integrated Standard Operating Procedures (SOPS) and Customized Action Planning.
Step #2: Optimize Individual Experiences
Once you have mastered the art of operational guest experience, it’s time to take the next step and tackle a more experiential approach. Operational approaches focus on creating a consistent experience for all your guests.
An experiential approach focuses on creating and optimizing a positive experience for each individual guest and answering questions such as:
- How do I understand the experience every individual guest has with my brand?
- How do I communicate with guests about their experience in a way that works for them?
- How do I turn negative guest experiences into positive ones?
- How do I incorporate employee feedback to improve the guest experience?
To truly optimize experiences, make sure you’re using a solution that allows you to listen to customers and respond to their individual experiences. To do this, you need to have a guest experience solution that allows you to listen to customer feedback on any and every possible channel, including:
- Review sites
- Social media
- In-App feedback
- Third-party delivery reviews
- Direct survey feedback
- Microsurvey feedback
- Employee feedback
- Call center data
- Video feedback
- Loyalty program data
- And more!
You can learn more about customer listening best practices in our eBook here!
Step #3: Innovate for Lasting Relationships
With the amount of competition in today’s food service market, creating loyalty with your guests is more important than ever—and the final step in completing your journey from an operational, to experiential, a truly innovative and relationship-based guest experience program.
Ensuring brand loyalty requires creating a high-quality, consistent experience at every touchpoint to answers questions like:
- How can I engage the guest in a friendly, authentic way?
- How can I give the guest the ability to customize their experience to their specific needs?
- How can I demonstrate awareness of the guests’ situation and acknowledge their needs?
- How can I create an experience for the guest that is perceived as a personalized experience?
- How can I remember the guests’ preferences and anticipate their changing needs?
- How can I incorporate guests’ feedback into my business?
When building an innovative, relationship-based guest experience program, look to integrate with loyalty and brand apps, meet guests on their terms, and understand the broader market landscape with tools like multi-touchpoint support and competitive benchmarking.
Guest Experience Is the Differentiator for Quick Service Restaurants
To sum it all up: Restaurants that consistently create high-quality, consistent experiences will separate themselves from their competitors. Want to learn about how the approach we laid out above has helped Pearl-Plaza clients to gain a reputation for excellent experiences and drive loyalty? Check out our eBook here to read about cutting-edge guest experience solutions and real stories from our world-class customers.
