Are Comment Cards Dead?

How to Use Traditional and Digital Comments Cards to Compile and Track Customer Feedback

They might seem outdated, but comment cards are still valuable tools you can use to gauge customer satisfaction. Despite the invaluable information they provide to restaurants, people are still crying: “The comment card is dead!” So, what’s so bad about comment cards?

Technology has enabled us to do away with paper almost completely. It’s simply too easy to click a checkbox on a website or a tablet. What we’ve learned, though, is that people are still more than willing to fill out comment cards.

The Good News About Comment Cards

Comment cards offer a whole host of benefits to restaurant owners. Let’s take a look at just a few of the insights you can get out of comment cards:

• Guest Satisfaction: Satisfied customers are more likely to return. Get an idea of what you did wrong, and you’ll have a better understanding of how to make it right. If your customers are telling you to keep up the good work — keep it up.
• Instant Feedback: The best way to get a feel for your guests’ experience is through instant feedback. Your guests are right there in your restaurant. Their experiences are still fresh. Guests are also more likely to respond to a survey at the time of the visit than at a later time. Instant feedback is the highest quality feedback you can receive.
• Staff Quality: Your guests place a fresh set of eyes on your staff. Your guests’ insights into your service staff can help you identify those who consistently perform at a high level and those who consistently perform a low level.
• Marketing & Promotional Opportunities: That birthday coupon you received from TGIFriday’s in your email box? You probably filled out a comment card. Asking the right questions on your comment cards can lead to a string of promotional opportunities.
• Relationship Building: You want your customers to come back. They best way to do that is by building a relationship with them. Just asking about family size can give you an idea of what’s important to your customer. A six-person family? You can bet they care about value. That’s how you’ll bring them back.

The Bad News About Comment Cards

We’ve seen the benefits of sticking to old-school methods of getting customer feedback. But there’s some bad news we need to cover. Comment cards pile up faster than a stack of invoices from Sysco. However, comment cards are easier to ignore, and ignoring your customers is costly.

If you’re using software to record information and data from comment cards, you’ll have to enter it manually. This takes time, something most restaurant owners don’t have. It also costs money to print and distribute comment cards, something most restaurant owners don’t want

Additionally, information collected from customers may not be appropriately shared across the organization. If there’s no central database for the comment cards, the information collected may not reach the right people. This renders comment cards ineffective. In order to continue providing the best possible service, the entire organization needs to be aware of the feedback.

Finally, customers who take the time to fill out your comment cards do so because they want to be heard. If it takes eight months to respond to a customer, that customer is now a previous customer. You’re going to have to work hard to recover them.

Comment Card Replacements

Comment cards aren’t dead. They’ve gone digital. Electronic surveys are appearing on tablets at fast casual restaurants. They’re even being integrated into POS systems. At Stacks restaurant, which has four locations across California, customers enjoy a 100% ordering and checkout experience right at their tables. At the end of the checkout process, guests can complete an electronic comment card.

Check Point Survey, available for tablets, is another way for restaurants to collect feedback. If these tools weren’t easy enough, Talk to The Manager provides customers with a way to provide anonymous feedback, via text message. All these tools are great. But how do you keep track of all that data?

Handling All the Feedback

Your customers are looking for an immediate resolution to the problems they encountered at your restaurant. The quicker you respond, the more likely your customer is to come back. If you’re using multiple solutions to gather feedback, it can become overwhelming to log into multiple systems and/or track paper comment cards. You need a way to organize all the data you’ve collected.

The best solution is to store all your data in one place. Pedanco helps you track, organize and engage customers, all in one place. If you’re still relying on paper cards, you can enter all the feedback into Pedanco. By having a centralized solution, all feedback can easily be analyzed and your team can be monitored to ensure each guest is contacted in a timely manner.

If you’ve moved to a digital feedback solution, or if you want to record comments posted on Facebook, Twitter and Yelp, you can enter those too. No matter how you get your customer feedback, whether on a tablet, a comment card or even a sticky note, the important thing to remember is that it’s indispensable.

Originally published at blog.pedanco.com.