SURVEY ON THE SPOT Blog

Making it easy isn’t all that it takes to get your guests to participate in your Customer Satisfaction surveys.  Assuring that there is shared accountability on the part of all of your team members is critical to gain participation, regardless of how easy and convenient you make it.  This has been demonstrated extremely well in a many situations.  In traditional, paper based or web environments, ensuring that your team encourages participation by pointing out receipt messaging is required to generate any hope of participation.  Even in a mobile survey environment, failure to engage your employees and customers in the process will lead to suboptimal survey participation despite the easy access to the survey.  Best practices include using a ‘business card’ for servers to present to customers on their arrival that identifies the servers name and the process to take the survey.  The use of contests and incentive programs that encourage servers to achieve the highest number of survey submissions also can be very effective.  This method creates very high levels of service awareness amongst employees while improving participation rates.  Most systems can easily control submission fraud, so that is not a critical issue.  The key to good participation rates in guest satisfaction measurement programs requires both ease of participation and and the efforts of everyone on your team.