If you are in the restaurant industry, you know that your customer’s opinions on your business can make a world of difference when it comes to increasing sales.

Nowadays, customers rely mostly on social media networks like Facebook, Twitter or Yelp  to spread out their opinions on products or services, which is always good, but it is impersonal and it doesn’t allow you as a business owner/manager to create a more direct line of communication with your patrons to be more aware of what’s working and what not on your business.

All business need customer feedback, but restaurants need it more than any other. Getting feedback from customers can be complicated and as a result,  upcoming problems can’t be fixed on time, causing them to get out of hand, leaving you with the risk of losing not one, but many customers.

Analyzing feedback can help guide you to make certain decisions and make changes that will benefit your service and/or products, to improve customer experience, collect data and measure customer satisfaction.

An excellent and easy way to collect feedback from customers is to use a restaurant feedback system. Implementing it the right way can can bring a lot of value to both parts, you as the owner and your customers.

Here, we have listed just some of the many benefits you can get from using a feedback tool in your restaurant:

1. Communicate with guests/patrons: You can request feedback in your restaurant and website in a non invasive way. A good idea would be requesting it through printed signs, links in receipts or website that your guests can access and leave their comments.

2. Grow your guest database: Through a customer feedback system you can gather and grow your database to help you market to more users each time.

3. Quality control: You can know what’s working and what’s not in real time, giving you the opportunity to solve any unexpected issue that could affect your restaurant’s reputation before it’s too late.

4. Grow positive online reviews: A customer feedback system  can help you implement strategies to grow your positive online reviews on important sites like Yelp or Google Local.

5. Avoid negative reviews: Both, positive and negative feedback are helpful for a business, but negative feedback has added benefits. It allows you to change people’s opinion, by acting on time and taking care of  the problem. This not only gives your business credibility, but it also makes the customer feel appreciated, this way is easier to keep them happy.

6. Get more repeat visits: A happy customer is a returning customer. By keeping your customers happy you increase the chances of getting more repeat business, this increasing sales.

7. Send emails, special offers, coupons & gift certificates: You can create custom emails, coupons, special offers and gift certificates to send periodically to your customer base and reward them for their preference.

Implementing a customer feedback system will help you understand and manage your restaurant’s feedback, and you’ll be able to use that information to offer a better service to improve your patrons experience.