BD's chain solicits guest feedback with electronic comment cards

Nation's Restaurant News, May 8, 2006 by Julie Ritzer Ross

Seeking more feedback from more diners, some operators are replacing paper comment cards and other traditional customer survey methods with automated systems designed to elicit patrons' opinions before they exit the restaurant.

Ferndale, Mich.-based BD's Mongolian Barbecue jumped on this bandwagon last year by implementing The Informant, an electronic comment card, or ECC, system that is part of the Allegiant Loyalty Tools product suite from Long Range Systems Inc. of Dallas.

"This is the kind of data that contributes to increased customer loyalty and sales," said Wayne Wright, BD's regional franchise director.

Other vendors of such ECC technology include In-Touch Survey Systems of Boston, whose product is called the Electronic Clipboard.

Paging technology specialist Jtech Communications, an early developer of ECC systems, no longer offers the devices, as company officials say operators expressed little interest in the tools. Some prior users of the technology have since moved to automated phone or Internet surveying systems, citing cost savings.

However, Long Range Systems said its ECC guest self-service survey device business is growing.

With systems like The Informant, restaurant customers share their opinions via handheld devices that are linked to individual servers or tables by way of special numeric codes. Delivered to diners along with their checks, the devices store collected information until the end of the working day, when they are returned to a docking station/terminal for recharging. With a secure Internet connection, data are uploaded via the terminal to the vendor's password-protected website for compilation into daily reports. The reports are generated overnight and e-mailed to corporate headquarters, area managers and general managers the following morning.

BD's Mongolian Barbecue has 11 company-owned and 15 franchised units, where customers select fresh ingredients for Mongolian stir-fry fare and observe as dishes are cooked on an open grill. The operator had long used a mystery shopper service to monitor its stores but was not satisfied with the scope of information it was able to glean using this method, Wright said.

"Shoppers visited each of our restaurants twice a month, once for lunch and once for dinner," Wright said. "They provided some valuable feedback about the customer experience, yet when we really looked at the number of people who go through our doors every day, the amount of information we were getting didn't cut it."

Posting surveys on the corporate website and inviting diners to express their views by calling a toll-free telephone number printed at the bottom of their checks proved no more effective, BD's officials indicated. Not long after scrapping these methods, BD's officials heard about The Informant, and a six-month pilot test of the system was subsequently conducted at a unit in Ann Arbor, Mich. The deployment has since been expanded to 19 stores, with the remaining units expected to go live with the system by the end of the company's second quarter.

Each BD's store has 20 of The Informant devices, which are shaped like restaurant tip trays and feature alphanumeric keypads. While Wright declined to release details of the operator's investment in the system, Ken Todd, Allegiant Loyalty Tools product manager, said the 50 independent and chain locations using the technology incurred a hardware purchase price of about $100 per device. Additional fees, which cover survey design and report generation, run approximately $12 per device per month, according to Todd.

Long Range Systems recommends that surveys contain a maximum of 10 to 15 questions. BD's version has 13 questions to encourage participation and keep response time to 90 seconds or less, Wright says. At present, respondents are asked whether they are first-time visitors and if they intend to dine there again.

Other questions cover such issues as whether servers met the requirement to offer a cup of coffee to go, whether staff members working at the grill interacted with them and whether food was ready in the targeted time of less than three minutes. Diners also are asked if they received a warm greeting upon arrival at the restaurant, as well as whether they were introduced to the server by the host, received a visit from the manager during the meal and were offered dessert before receiving their check.

The last two questions in the survey include one request to categorize the food as "best," "good", "fair" or "poor," and another asks whether BD's provides "good value for the money." At present, around 80 percent of BD's diners participate in the survey, chain officials indicated. To encourage repeat participation among regular customers as well as to collect as much information as possible, the operator plans to replace a portion of the survey questions with new ones every three months. "For example, we may remove the coffee question and add one about whether servers promoted featured items or beverages," Wright said. "Or we might ask about restroom cleanliness. Anything that relates to the customer experience is fair game."