Revolutionizing the Restaurant Industry with Generative AI
Turning Customer Feedback into Actionable Insights
Generative AI is a gift to the restaurant industry. Why? Because you can have your cake & eat it too. Here’s how you should be designing customer feedback surveys in a way that gives you data worth acting upon.
Customer feedback can make or break a restaurant. But capturing that feedback is only the first step; transforming it into actionable insights is where the real magic happens. Yet, many organizations struggle with standardized feedback mechanisms that prioritize backend convenience over meaningful customer insights. Smartbridge, through its innovative use of generative AI, is helping restaurants harness the full potential of customer feedback to drive transformative change.
Surveys should always be designed with the customer’s experience in mind, rather than the limitations of a data warehouse. As Steve Senterfit, President of Smartbridge, advises, “Create a survey that invites the most passionate customers to provide specifics that you can act on, and adapt the questions to accommodate different products or services.” This principle drives Smartbridge’s approach to building solutions that leverage cutting-edge generative AI technology, enabling restaurants to unlock actionable insights and elevate their customer satisfaction strategies.
The Pitfalls of Standardized Feedback Mechanisms
Traditional survey methods often fall short of delivering actionable insights. Standardized forms designed to simplify data collection for customer success teams can miss the nuances of customer sentiment and fail to capture the specifics that drive meaningful change.
By focusing on backend convenience, these surveys often disregard the unique perspectives and needs of customers. Senterfit highlights the issue: “It’s difficult to get actionable insights out of standardized forms that were simply designed to make it easier on the customer success teams for the sake of collecting and creating dashboards.”
Instead, Smartbridge emphasizes designing surveys that accommodate the customer experience. Open text fields allow customers to share detailed feedback, providing an avenue for the most passionate customers to voice specific concerns or praises. This approach shifts the focus from merely gathering data to uncovering actionable insights.
Generative AI: Transforming Feedback Analysis in the Restaurant Industry
The advent of generative AI has revolutionized how restaurants analyze and act on customer feedback. This technology excels at processing vast amounts of unstructured data, such as open-text survey responses and online reviews, and transforming it into actionable insights.
Smartbridge recently demonstrated the power of generative AI by building a solution for the world’s largest full-service restaurant company. This organization faced the daunting task of analyzing over 6 million customer reviews across multiple brands. They needed a way to identify patterns, commonalities, and actionable insights without getting lost in the data.
Using generative AI, Smartbridge developed a tool that could coalesce this diverse feedback, uncover trends, and answer specific questions. As Senterfit explains, “With tools like generative AI, it’s easier than ever to bring in diverse data and formats and create quantitative insights out of it.” The result was a powerful system that enabled the client to investigate any aspect of customer feedback efficiently and effectively.
Practical Applications in the Food Service Industry
The actionable insights derived from AI-analyzed feedback are transforming the restaurant industry in several key areas:
IT and operations teams play a crucial role in implementing these insights. By tracking departmental metrics such as staffing levels, restaurants can anticipate staffing needs and optimize resources to support feedback-driven initiatives. “We track employee counts for clients in certain departments, such as IT and Operations. This is an indicator that they may need us for staff augmentation if their headcount dips, or they are preparing for a significant budget increase or capital project if they start aggressively hiring,” notes Senterfit.
The Future of Feedback with AI in Restaurants
The integration of generative AI into customer feedback systems represents just the beginning of what’s possible. Looking ahead, restaurants can expect even greater benefits:
Customer feedback is one of the most valuable assets for restaurants, but its true potential is unlocked only when it’s analyzed and acted upon effectively. By designing feedback systems that prioritize the customer experience and leveraging generative AI to analyze diverse and complex data, restaurants can gain insights that drive real change.
Smartbridge’s innovative solutions, as highlighted in its work with a global full-service restaurant company, demonstrate how generative AI is transforming the way feedback is used in the industry. “Always design your surveys to accommodate the customer,” Senterfit advises. With this approach and the power of AI, restaurants can deliver exceptional experiences and stay ahead in a competitive landscape.
Ready to take your customer feedback to the next level? Discover how Smartbridge’s generative AI solutions can revolutionize your operations and customer satisfaction today. Explore our AI services and schedule a consultation instantly on our calendar.
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