Make friends with technology
Do you ever feel like you're struggling to keep up with the pace of change? Well, it seems to me it's a universal feeling. The sheer quantity of technological innovation on so many fronts is creating tsunami-like waves of change. Just when you think you've ridden and assimilated one wave, you spot several more about to break.
One of the most interesting and opportunity-laden areas of change is the rise of social networking. It's already making a vast difference to the way the pub sector is doing business. The smartest operators are using it to understand customers, make changes they want and drive sales.
We all know that customer satisfaction is king. A study by managed operator Mitchells & Butlers (M&B) of 1,200 of its pubs last year showed that the top quartile in customer satisfaction feedback terms produced a 6.6% increase in sales. At the 25% of pubs where customer satisfaction was at its lowest, sales dipped by 4.2%.
The company admitted that a few short years ago it simply didn't understand the social networking phenomenon. It's caught up quickly — and leads the field in a number of ways. It now seeks to measure customer satisfaction at individual sites daily.
And it has found a web-based tool that renders old-style mystery customer visits virtually redundant because of their infrequency and, therefore, inadequacy. It offers customers the chance of a £1,000 cash prize if they write a report on their dining experience on the brand website.
Lo and behold, this captures customer detail for future web marketing campaigns and produces around 40 pieces of feedback per week on each site. The feedback is inarguable and direct comment on the quality of customers' experience site-by-site.
Meanwhile, there are 20 million people in the UK with Facebook accounts — and the potential here is enormous. Toby Carvery has no fewer than 212,000 followers on Facebook, many times more than the much bigger JD Wetherspoon.
M&B executives believe that the time may soon come when it can rely entirely on Facebook to take the temperature in terms of customer satisfaction. Read the Toby Carvery Facebook site and you'll find customers paying individual pubs compliments — and also strong criticism of disappointing food and service. Why would M&B want to provide a forum for such negative comment about Toby Carvery?
The answer is simple. Its customers are making these comments to friends and colleagues anyway out in the real world. Much better to allow customers to say them directly — this way there's a chance to address the issues. Nothing negates negative feeling than the sense that a business takes complaints seriously. Every complaint contains at least a kernel of truth — listening via a Facebook site offers the learnings needed for continuous improvement.
