Net Promoter Score for Restaurants and Hospitality
Making decisions is hard, and when a decision has to be made by a prospective customer, they will evaluate several factors. There is of course your venue website and your attractive menu, all of which is within your control. What is not within your control, at least not directly, is public recommendations made online which are visible for all to see. This can be a frustrating experience for you as a hospitality business owner as it feels like you have little or no control over your online reputation. That is why the Net Promoter Score for restaurants and hospitality businesses is absolutely critical and why you to learn more about how it can impact your business in a positive way. If you want to see how you can start generating net promoter scores for your restaurant, bar or hotel right away check out this page
What is Net Promoter Score
Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a customer feedback, that among other things, measures how likely your customers are to recommend your business to a friend. Net Promoter Score for restaurants and hospitality businesses offers a way to evaluate and improve customer loyalty. It is different from other feedback options as it measures a customers overall sentiment about a brand, giving a much more holistic sense of a customers perception. The Net Promoter Score is a tried and tested scientific method that is widely utilized in many industries
Net Promoter Score Methodology
It all comes down to one question, which is:
On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend?
As you would expect the customer can only select one answer, and these answers can fall into one of three categories
- Promoters – Customers who answer the question with a 9 – 10
- Passives – Customers who answer the question with a 7 – 8
- Detractors – Customers who answer the question with a 0 – 6
It is fairly obvious what the intentions of these categories of customers is, but for the sake of completeness, we have provided a more articulate indicator of their value
- Promoters – Enthusiastic and Loyal Customers who will tell their friends about your business and bring in new customers
- Passives – Indifferent and could become promoters, or they could switch to the competition
- Detractors – Unhappy customers, who you risk losing as customers and worse again could damage your business by sharing their bad experience
Calculating Net Promoter Score
To get an overall Net Promoter Score for your business you simply subtract the percentage of detractors (customers who wouldn’t recommend you) from the percentage of promoters (customers who would recommend you). Passive responses are left out of this equation as they are regarded as neutral, and therefore not likely to give a review, good or bad.
For example, if you surveyed 100 people and 55 were promoters and 15 were detractors you would have a net promoter score of 40. Obviously the higher the net promoter score for restaurants and hospitality businesses, the better the customer experience has been for your customers
NPS = % of Promoters minus the % of Detractors
Benefits of Net Promoter Score for Restaurants, Bars and Hotels
NPS is a widely used measure, however in the context of this article, we are going to focus specifically on the benefits of Net Promoter Score for restaurants and hospitality businesses. The hospitality business is unique, in that there is a lot of qualitative indicators, between staff and customers, most of which are moments in time, never recorded and even less likely to be acted on. We have detailed below the various benefits of NPS, specifically in relation to restaurants and other hospitality businesses.
Identify your Champions
The customers how provide a 9 or 10 in their feedback are called promoters and they are precious to your business when it comes to value. These people have specifically indicated that they will tell their friends about how good your restaurant, hotel or bar is. Think about this for a second… How valuable is that customer to your business? Being able to specifically identify them and then take an action based on that knowledge can really make a difference. Examples of potential actions include:
- Ask them to review your business online (likely to be a good review as they have already indicated their positive experience)
- Sign them up to your loyalty program
- Sell them a gift voucher that they can give to friends for birthdays and special events
- Ask them to follow you on social media so you can maintain the relationship
There are so many positive action steps that you can take, once you know, for certain that this person has a very positive experience of your business
Provides a big picture view of Customer Experience
Customer Experience is an overarching measure of how customers engage with your restaurant, bar or hotel, not just a snapshot in time. With sufficient data you can get an excellent leading indicator of customer satisfaction, and your NPS can be measured over time. You will be able to see when customer experience levels increase and decrease, and what if any measures to improve it have worked. It also allows you to easily benchmark against competitors who are using a similar metric
Quick, Straightforward and Inexpensive
One of the most appealing elements of the Net Promoter Score for restaurants and hospitality business is the simplicity of the question and how easy it is to implement. To get the most value from NPS you need to ask using email, as you at least have a follow up mechanism for your customers. Probably the most difficult part of this is getting the customer email in the first place. Using Guest WiFi to capture email is one efficient way to do that, as well as emails from booking systems
Measure of Customer Loyalty
Net Promoter Score for restaurants, bars and hotels is a great way to measure customer loyalty, and their likelihood of returning to spend more money in your business. Most hospitality businesses thrive on repeat business, so being able to identify and reward loyal customers makes that objective easier
Generate Positive Online Reviews
Although mentioned briefly above, one of the highest value added activity you can do as a restaurant, bar or hotel owner is to get more positive online reviews. It is not easy to have a direct impact on reviews in general, never mind moving the needle on positive reviews. That is why knowing who your promoters are is so valuable, as you can simply ask them to review your business online. For example if you wanted more google reviews of the positive variety or Yelp reviews then you simply ask your promoters to leave a review for you. MyPlace Connect will be adding more features helping you achieve this goal automatically, so watch this space. It is worth pointing out that TripAdvisor do not allow preselection of user data i.e. you cannot pick promoters only for example, to be uploaded to their TripAdvisor Review Express feature. The MyPlace Connect TripAdvisor Automated Review Generation feature for example, does not pre-select promoter only data
Open Feedback
As well as having a scientific, rigid structure for the first part, the second part of the Net Promoter Score question is much more open and qualitatve. Upon answering the first question, the customers is then asked why they gave that response, and invited to leave some open feedback. This open feedback will provide additional insight into why the respondent did or did not like their experience of your restaurant bar or hotel
Drawbacks of NPS for Hospitality
It is difficult to pick holes in a simple yet powerful question that can provide valuable insight into your customers perception of their experience in your business. That being said, NPS does have some limitations, which for the sake of balance, would be remiss not to address:
- Not Specific Enough – Only one open question not enough to find out why customers could be detractors
- Next Steps Needed – Capturing NPS on its own is inneffective unless you have a follow up plan
- Data Needed – Method of contacting customers is needed. Can be difficult to ask when they are in the restaurant, bar or hotel
How can I get my customers to provide an NPS for my business?
OK, we have outlined what NPS is, and how it can benefit your hospitality business. Now we can focus on how you can get started getting some NPS feedback. As a general rule, you will need contact information from your customers. This simply means that you will need their email address, phone number or social profile. Phone numbers are of limited use as it is difficult to then follow up with customers in any kind of user friendly way and they are not usually linked to any website or review site. Social profiles are of limited use unless you carry out your NPS survey from within the social media environment. This will also produce limitations as your ability to follow up through the social platform will be very much restricted, if available at all. That leaves you with email, which is a direct link to your customer that you own (LINK 0 direct kink to customers) It is also possible to get anomys feedback through paper forms and digital screens, but you may as well not even bother as you lose the ability to follow up as you have no idea who they are
How can I get my customers email for NPS requests
Getting your customers email is on its own, one of the highest value activity you can do. There are several ways you can collect customer email
- Capture email on WiFi – easy, hands off automated way to build a valuable database (This is a no brainer, if you are not doing this already start now – please ask us for a demo
- Through your table or room reservation system – another good source of customer data
- Customer comment cards – A little crude and also not very effective. Will also need to be manually input into some kind of CRM
- Competitions – Running competitions where you can capture email as part of the process
Note: If you are in Europe, or have European customers please be mindful of GDPR regulation (A good WiFi Marketing (Link) service, like MyPlace WiFi CRM will have you covered for this)
Now I have their email, what next?
Well, now all you have to do is ask…
It is not quite as simple as that. At this stage you will have a list of your customers emails, but you will also need some context, the most important one being, when were they actually in your restaurant, bar or hotel? They will need to have been there relatively recently for you to able to ask them about their experience. The good news is that the sources of your data are likely to have some kind of time stamp as to when the customer was there.
- WiFi CRM, like MyPlace Connect, will know exactly when and for how long a customer was in the venue
- Table or room reservation system will know what day and time they were in your business
- Comment cards or tablet feedback, although limited in function and scope should have some kind of indicator of when the customer was in the business
