How to Encourage Guests (and Employees) to Keep Feedback Private

With smartphones and social media apps always at the ready, it’s become increasingly easier for guests to snap a photo of a lackluster meal or dirty dining experience and share their unhappy review about it in real time. On the flipside of that, you have mobile-equipped employees to worry about now, too. Take what happened at the Hickory Tavern in North Carolina, for instance.

You have a server and you have a guest. The server provides the guest with the requested food, drink, and hospitality, and then the guest departs… But not before leaving a piece of “feedback” at the bottom of the receipt.

Suffice to say, the reason this made the news was because the guest left an inappropriate comment at the bottom of the receipt, and the server in turn shared a photo of it on social media. As a result, the server was fired for violating the company’s confidentiality policy (and then later reinstated when the social media backlash grew too big to ignore).

So, who is to blame here? Was it the guest for leaving an unkind and bigoted remark at the bottom of a receipt he or she knew the intended target would see? Was it the server for airing his work-related grievance on social media? Or was it the restaurant owner for not having better control over how feedback was solicited and handled within that location?

To be fair, all three are at fault. While no one can be blamed for wanting to share their feedback or commentary about a situation with others, there is a time and place for making that feedback public and for keeping it private. As a restaurant owner or manager, it’s your responsibility to see to it that everyone in your restaurant is encouraged to follow the proper channels when doing so.

Why You Should Always Encourage Private Feedback

It’s odd how much disruption a single receipt can cause a restaurant. Just look at Twitter. You’ll see plenty of examples of nasty notes left on receipts, $0 tip lines, as well as the occasional extravagant tipper. While a piece of paper with a guest’s bill of fare might not seem like a public declaration of how one feels about your restaurant, it’s what your guests or employees do with it afterwards that is.

You can see from the Hickory Tavern example that the owners of the restaurant had the right idea when they put a confidentiality clause within their employees’ manuals in order to protect the identities of customers. What they did wrong, however, was to not more explicitly call attention to this clause, to reinforce their policy on social media usage as it relates to the restaurant’s affairs, and to not provide guests with the right channels through which to share their feedback.

Obviously, you don’t want to discourage anyone from commenting on your restaurant — whether that be positive or negative — but things that are disparaging and not helpful in promoting a restaurant should not be brought to the public forum. This is just as much the case for guests as it is for employees.

So, what do you do? While you can’t be responsible for what every person writes on their receipts or posts online, you can do a better job of mitigating those circumstances to begin with.

Here is where you should focus your efforts:

Receipts

At the bottom of each receipt, provide guests with a number or link they can use to answer a short survey about their dining experience. You can create these sort of surveys for cheap with WuFoo and TypeForm, which integrate easily with the Pedanco system.

Signage

While you don’t want to overwhelm guests with messaging about surveys, it’s important that every guest has an opportunity to see that you’re listening and waiting for their feedback. You can use signage around your restaurant or printed on a table tent to promote a link to the survey.

Tablets

Tableside kiosks and tablets are a great way to get instant feedback from guests, too. Give them the option to leave a comment or fill out a short survey after the dining experience.

Email or Newsletter

Amassing a list of loyal email subscribers isn’t just helpful for spreading news about upcoming promotions or big changes coming to your menu. You can use this opportunity to share a link to your survey and encourage guests to share their experiences on your social media pages.

Loyalty App

You have a direct connection to your most loyal guests through your mobile app. Take advantage of this by creating a dedicated space where they can leave their feedback. And don’t be afraid to use push notifications to remind them to do so after a recent dining experience.

Website

Even if guests aren’t subscribed to your newsletter or mobile app, you can still reach them through your website if they happen to stop by. Just be sure you have a pop-up survey enabled and a contact form that encourages feedback.

Social Media

Although you can’t control what people say about your restaurant on this platform, you can take certain steps to ensure that it doesn’t get out of control on social media:

• Add a link to your online survey on your page.
• Share a short post once a week that encourages guests to leave their feedback, comments, or share their experiences on your feed. (Better on your feed than undetected elsewhere on social.)
• Monitor all your social accounts regularly. Acknowledge all feedback and then DM the guest. Or speak with your employee privately at work.

Workforce Management Software

Don’t forget about the channels through which your employees can leave feedback. Because, even though some guests may be in the wrong for what they’ve said or done, that doesn’t justify an employee potentially smearing your company name publicly. Give them a private survey system of their own through which they can communicate their grievances or discuss an event that personally affected them.

In addition to encouraging guests and employees to go through the right channels, training needs to be part of your feedback plan. Specifically, to train employees:

• …on the best ways to share these feedback channels with guests and encourage them to leave their comments there.
• …how to handle negative feedback, record it, and send it through the proper channels so that corporate can properly handle it. This is a critical part of the guest recovery process.
• …on your confidentiality and social media policies. They need to understand that emotional responses to negative feedback are warranted, but that it’s unprofessional and unacceptable to share them online.

Summary

In sum, private feedback enables you to control what is said about your restaurant in the public domain or, at the very least, gives you the opportunity to do damage control on the outside while focusing on making the guest (or employee) happy behind closed doors. Likewise, private feedback is helpful for ensuring that all team members are on board with upholding your restaurant’s public image, no matter how personally offensive the feedback may be.

In the end, your guests have a right to be heard, no matter how wrong they are or how inappropriate the feedback. The same goes for your employees. That said, the best way to handle this is through private channels, not for the whole world to watch as the awkward, unprofessional, and very public back-and-forth unfolds.