Analysis
Restaurants are highly dependent on customers. A satisfied customer will also visit the restaurant again, but whether customers repeatedly visit the restaurant is very difficult for the restaurant to comprehend. Therefore it would be helpful to ask the customers about their satisfaction after their stay and to get feedback on what could be improved during the next visit.
During the stay at the restaurant two dimensions can be evaluated:
- Quality and satisfaction with the food.
- Friendliness and satisfaction with the service staff.
Currently, it is really hard to evaluate the food and service during eating without a media disruption. For example, you don't want to be interrupted by a survey while enjoying your meal. On the one hand this interrupts the moment of enjoyment and on the other hand it ensures that the food is cold afterwards. Therefore, an evaluation after eating is much easier and more customer friendly. Additionally, gathering feedback at all creates a strong media disruption because at the moment you have to evaluate the restaurants on various social media pages or rating portals like Google, Yelp, Facebook. Nevertheless, feedback is highly important for the restaurant to improve its food selection and service based on customer feedback and data analysis. This should happen directly at the restaurant and not hours later on an external website.
Customer feedback comes in multiple forms and from multiple sources. We have organized them in three categories: given, requested, and observed.
- Given: This is any type of feedback your customers proactively send in without being asked or encouraged to do so. Some examples of given feedback are support tickets, phone calls, live chat conversations, and social media messages.
- Requested: Requested feedback is when you take the initiative to contact customers and ask for suggestions to improve the product or the way you communicate with them. The most popular requested feedback tool is a NPS (Net Promoter Score) survey, where customers have to answer several questions about whether or not they would recommend the company to others.
- Observed: This is the feedback you get when monitoring how your customers interact with your products, the paths they follow, and the documentation they read.
We decided that it would be hard to implement an observed feedback process in a restaurant without the customers feeling monitored. That's why we thought about creating a mix of given and requested feedback, because on the one hand we ask the customer for feedback and want to know how satisfied he is (requested feedback), but on the other hand IoT should allow feedback to happen without media disruption and should be so diligently integrated into the existing process that the customer thinks he gives feedback on his own initiative (given feedback)
- Feedback could be integrated into the table and you could give feedback by touching the table.
- Feedback could be integrated into the tableware and the change in weight could be used to measure how good the food tasted.
- With the help of face recognition or health data like heart rate you could measure how good the food tasted or how kind the service was.
- During the payment process you could give feedback by signing the bill, for example you could have different fields where you can sign depending on how satisfied you are.
- You can leave the restaurant through different doors dependent on how good the quality of the food was.
In order to make the whole implementation process easier, we targeted a premium self-service restaurant. It was important to us that the food was of high quality, so that there was also a reason to give feedback if the food did not meet the expectations. In addition, the existing digital technology in a self-service restaurant simplifies the use of IoT.
You can find a more detailed analysis of the As-Is process and what IoT possibilities you can use to reach the To-Be process in the section "Ideation".
- Feedback is influenced by human interaction with restaurant employees (social pressure)
- Difference between food or service feedback not obvious
