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Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Please fill up form

Fence Sitter
Please fill up form
By A. R. Samson

Customer feedback is now a necessity as it is intended toguide management in http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=1625658718409263251#enticing customers to be loyal and keep coming back. If something offends them they need tolet the management know.

Perhaps, too, it is to understand the profile of people who walk into their place and what they like or don’t like about the food or service that restaurants now routinely require customers to give their comments. The waiter looks sheepish when handing out the small card with the questions. He knows he is interrupting someone trying toget further into a conversation with his lunch mate on the possibilities of dessert, not necessarily in the same place, or even involving artificial sugar.

The waiter provides a short pencil (easier to erase) confident that no one is going to pocket it as a keepsake, like matches which are no longer provided due to the smoking ban. The form covers marketing concerns like where one has heard of the restaurant -- whether from a radio ad or the person on top of the escalator handing out flyers. The true answer is not among the choices. It’s a bother to tell the truth -- I haven’t heard of this restaurant before today and I just wandered in by mistake. I thought this joint was cheap.

Most of the questions cover service and the state of the food when served -- was the feta cheese in your salad properly cubed? Theresponsiveness of the servers seems to be a big concern and probably contributes to the person’s performance rating. (Did your order arrive before your vacation leave was over?) Another category involves the product offering-what do you want us to addto the menu? Did you like your alfalfa sprouts?

A properly filled-up form is meant to guide the establishment in improving itself and attracting more patronage in the future, if only from the person filling up the form and hopefully providing accurate information.

But one wonders what happens to all of this customer feedback.
First, it is important to note that not everybody (please help us improve our service) is willing to spend 10 minutes to accomplish this unpleasant chore. The customer came in to eat and order from the available menu (Sir, we don’t have tripe this lunch. Neither do we have the John Dory). He expects to be served, eat in peace, chat uninterruptedly with his date, pay his bill and geton with the rest of his day -- that’s the social contract.

So, who actually fills up these feedback forms? They fall into three categories: a) those with time on their hands waiting for a meeting nearby at 3 p.m.; b) those who are unusually peeved by the service and this is their equivalent of writing letters to the editor when they object to a column; and c) those with a perverse sense of humor. So, here you have what statisticians call a biased sample. Those who don’t bother with the form is not in the sample.

Do the servers and store managers take a peek at the comments? One can only surmise the tug of war between propriety (this will go straight to upper management in the franchise headquarters in New Hampshire) and curiosity, which may affect promotion and job security. Guess which end of the rope wins this contest. So, what percentage of the forms actually reaches head office for market research? Is there going to be another bias for positive feedback? Your workers in this branch are of sterling character.They see the customer as an opportunity for daily sanctification. Where do you get such dedicated human beings? (The handwriting may be identical to that of the person being praised to high heavens.)

So once the biased sample’s pre-screened ballots are toted up, what marketing information do you have? Maybe the conclusions will involve higher compensation for an overworked but motivated (almost bursting into song) work force. Perhaps, the menu can do with some pruning, involving the removal of never available offerings. The advertising budget can be eliminated, as the customers seem to already know so much about the restaurant with word of mouth: I heard about your place from a friend who says this place is ideal for dates as it is always empty and not likely to provide an opportunity into bumping into anyone I know.

The important insights are those not found in the form, simply because those who have not eaten in the restaurant (or bothered filling up) are unaccounted for. The non-customers (also called new business) are never heard from in this particular exercise.

There is also the element of tampering with the negative results, like throwing them in the circular file. If there seems to be a low rate of return of the forms, the service definitely sucks, or the restaurant has just ran out of pencils.

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