How to Use Technology to Improve Customer Survey Response Management and Real-Time Feedback

In the restaurant industry, collecting feedback is crucial to success. Restaurants thrive when they can cater to customer needs, respond to issues and evolve with changing preferences. Failing to gather real-time customer feedback and manage responses in this fiercely competitive business will leave you in the dust!

But how do you effectively manage all that data? It's one thing to send out frequent pulse surveys or read through survey responses. However, collecting real, meaningful insights requires you to collect feedback en masse and respond to concerns to protect your restaurant's reputation while promoting growth.

That's a lot to juggle on your plate. Luckily, technology is here to help. In this guide, you'll learn more about the technologies available and how to harness the power of review and feedback management systems to elevate your restaurant while delivering top-notch customer experiences.

The Importance of Managing Survey Responses

There are many reasons you need to manage survey responses. Sending out surveys is often integral to a restaurant's marketing strategy. It's how you learn about the customer experience, what people like, what they don't, etc. The data you collect ultimately helps foster data-driven decisions, allowing you to make meaningful changes that improve your business and boost your bottom dollar.

You can use surveys to gain insight into every facet of your business, including customer service from your employees, the quality of your food, the overall dining ambiance and the value proposition your establishment offers. That information can help you identify opportunities, improve weak points in your business and so much more.

Surveys come in all forms, and the right survey approach typically involves multiple surveys targeted at varying demographics. You may also have different survey cadences, customer base segments and other factors that help you gather data that runs the gamut of your overall customer experience.

All that data matters, but to a customer, it can sometimes feel like a lost cause. That's why you need an effective feedback management system to help you manage responses. Following up and reaching out to customers who provide honest feedback will reassure them that their opinions matter. It shows them that your business takes customer responses seriously.

That can ultimately improve your restaurant's reputation. It can even help boost engagement, increase response rates and make people more willing to participate in any survey you send out. But that's not all.

Using a platform that offers enterprise feedback management tools can also help your business be more proactive about fostering positive change. Consolidated reports can help you understand customer needs and discover important truths about the customer experience, allowing you to take steps to improve things.

Your goal shouldn't be to collect feedback for the sake of collecting feedback. It should be to apply what you learn, respond to what people think and create a never-ending feedback loop that leads to continual growth and improvement.

The Importance of Getting Feedback in Real-Time

Real-time feedback can change your approach to growth and help you develop a great customer feedback loop. Learning about a customer's experience after the fact is one thing. But learning about concerns and less-than-stellar experiences in real-time empowers you to flip the script.

Picture this:

You have a customer who experiences serious problems when ordering food at your restaurant. Perhaps they encounter a technical issue in your mobile app or have a not-so-nice interaction with an employee. Those problems stick with customers and can instantly sour their perception of your business.

In most cases, that sour experience goes unaddressed. So, what does the customer do? They stew in their frustration and may leave a bad review that harms your reputation.

Collecting real-time user feedback with techniques and best practices like pulse surveys can change how that scenario plays out. Say, for example, the customer fills out a quick pulse survey. You get that information almost instantly; your feedback management tool alerts you to the problem in real time.

Now, you have the power to change that customer's experience. You can greet them, discuss the problem and make things right. That customer can then leave your restaurant feeling good about the experience.

Real-time feedback goes beyond customer insights, allowing you to create positive change and turn a bad experience into a good one. Real-time feedback and pulse surveys are becoming increasingly popular for those reasons. While many companies use them to collect and give employee feedback, they're becoming more prevalent in customer feedback systems because of their potential to help businesses stay on top of reputation management while catering to every customer need.

Ways You Can Harness Technology

Gathering real-time feedback and managing survey responses is no easy task. However, technology makes it easier for restaurants to succeed in this area. No matter the type of restaurant you run or how many customers you serve every day, you, too, can harness technology to deliver the best customer experience possible and use customer feedback for positive change.

1. Easily Collect Insights With Live Chat Surveys

Do you have a mobile app? If so, it's likely an effective point of contact for your customer. The best restaurant applications create a seamless experience, allowing patrons to order food, participate in in-app surveys and even contact customer support. Plus, apps are fantastic for branding and market research.

You can gather real-time feedback and manage responses through live chat systems. Live chat platforms are powerful tools for businesses of any kind. They allow customers to reach out to support from anywhere without the awkwardness of live telephone calls or the lengthy wait times of traditional email.

Many customers prefer live chat to alternative forms of customer service, and they're more willing to communicate their thoughts through an in-app message. While some think that live chat discussions lack empathy, that couldn't be farther from the truth. Because of live chat technology's accessibility and relative anonymity, people are often eager to leave their honest thoughts behind.

So why not take advantage of that fact and collect insights?

There are many innovative ways for live chat features and help desks to gather insights. One option is to provide traditional survey questions. Many help desk systems offer basic survey questions at the end of every interaction, allowing customers to provide their thoughts about the experience. You can do the same while expanding the questions to collect more in-depth information about the broader customer experience at your restaurant.

Another option is to use the right tools to pull insights from standard customer support conversations. Every in-app message your patrons send can contain relevant information about their experiences and opinions.

The right tools can pull and consolidate that data for easy viewing and analysis.

There's one major benefit to live chat systems: real-time responses. Your customers are already engaged in conversation, so you can make things right and provide responses that benefit them.

It's about providing instantaneous response, an experience many customers would love to have when giving feedback.

2. Manage Online Conversations About Your Brand With Social Media Monitoring

Social media is king, and restaurants can achieve great success when they fully exploit its potential. Social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and more are all great channels for advertising your business and connecting with customers. But it can also be the thing that kills your restaurant.

We've all seen horror stories of restaurant reviews going viral and harming an establishment's chance of success. It's not uncommon for these viral discussions to end with a restaurant shuttering its doors.

Don't let that happen to your business! The right customer feedback tool will have features that make efficient social media monitoring possible.

Depending on the size and success of your restaurant, you may receive hundreds of tags and reviews daily. Even with a solid social media management team, getting through everything is impossible. That's why you need a system that can help you monitor social media activity automatically.

The right tools will identify potential negative reviews and critical conversations, allowing you to take action. The goal isn't to squash those dialogues. It's about responding to them and directing the conversation.

So many social media discussions get out of hand and go viral because restaurants don't respond to them promptly. Concerns don't get heard or addressed, and more people can latch onto that bad experience and spread it like wildfire.

But when you have a system in place to monitor social media conversations, you can jump in and take action as soon as possible. It's about responding to criticism and making things right. You'll find that monitoring social media discussions allows you to be more proactive about managing your reputation online, preventing one bad review from turning into a reputation-ruining event.

These technologies aren't limited to bad reviews. You can also use them to respond to positive reviews, fun hashtags and great user-generated content. Customers love it when businesses interact via social media, so having tools to monitor discussions and bring those conversations to light makes a difference.

3. Use AI Sentiment Analysis to Sort Your Customer Survey Responses

Artificial intelligence (AI) is quickly changing the face of every industry. While some tech leaders fear the power of AI, there are many great ways to take advantage of it to maximize success. One is through AI sentiment analysis.

Sentiment analysis is a unique process that analyzes the emotional tone of a piece of text.

These days, companies often receive large volumes of feedback. In addition to survey responses, there are comments on social media and reviews on countless third-party sites. Even with a dedicated customer success team, it's impossible to go through every review and feedback you receive.

AI sentiment analysis can help you identify the most important responses and comments. That's not to say that positive feedback doesn't deserve your attention. It's still important and worthy of a response. But you need to respond to the reviews with negative emotions as quickly as possible.

AI is a powerful tool that can quickly identify emotions in text. The technology can sift through the hundreds of correspondence and survey responses you receive daily, separating comments into distinct emotional categories. Through simple analysis, AI can unveil positive, negative and neutral comments.

Use those emotional categories to your advantage! Prioritize negative reviews and comments to stay one step ahead of reputation management. Instead of ignoring those comments and allowing customers to fester in their emotions, respond to make things right.

A timely response can make all the difference, changing a customer's perspective while allowing your restaurant to protect its reputation.

4. Utilize All-In-One Software

There's no shortage of software options available for restaurants. You might have one dedicated to order management, another to aggregate orders from third-party delivery platforms, one for finances, etc. You may also have dedicated software for customer feedback management and surveys.

While stand-alone software is better than nothing at all, wouldn't it be nice if you could do everything on one platform with great ease of use? Well, you're in luck!

Modern software development and AI technology have paved the way for innovative software solutions that can do it all. These platforms act as feedback management systems while helping you manage your day-to-day operations. From accepting and fulfilling orders to sending out surveys, all-in-one platforms take care of it all while keeping everything in a single, easy-to-use ecosystem.

The biggest benefit of using all-in-one software is that you have access to all the data and response management tools you need in one place. With a single platform, you can send surveys, collect data and analyze it all to gain actionable insights. No more moving to 3rd-party tools or worrying about managing massive data sets.

The right tools can make sense of all the feedback data you collect, turning that information into identifiable opportunities for improvement. That's not all.

All-in-one software can also help you manage reviews from all sources. You're not limited to reviews on your website or mobile application. The best software will aggregate reviews from dedicated review sites, delivery apps and more.

That aggregation and consolidation gives you an eagle-eye view of your patrons' thoughts. More importantly, you can use AI technology to respond to reviews and comments automatically, spot negative reviews that require personalized attention and more. By keeping everything under one digital software roof, you can maximize productivity and make real strides toward growing your business and meeting customer needs.

Get Started With Superorder Today

Ready to start using technology to your advantage? Technological advances are making things easier for restaurateurs. The old-school divide between businesses and consumers no longer exists, and you can use innovative software to engage with patrons in ways that were never possible in the past.

Responding to feedback can help you develop a strong bond with your customer base while managing your reputation for continued success.

When you want the easiest way to collect, manage and respond to feedback, check out Superorder. Superorder is an all-in-one restaurant management platform with countless features to help you with everyday operations while fostering growth. The review management and survey response management features are second to none, making it easier than ever to keep your supporters engaged while demonstrating your continued commitment to delivering a better customer experience.

Check out Superorder today to get started and learn how to use technology to change your entire approach to customer feedback.