Have you ever caught yourself coming to a conclusion based on an assumption? Okay, I’m guilty too. Fortunately, having used the Preferred Feedback system for some time I’ve learned to look at the facts instead of making assumptions. Here is an example of a wrong assumption I once made…

I was an absentee owner in a restaurant that was consistently running below our minimum “Guest Satisfaction Score” goal. I also knew that this restaurant was managed by an individual that worked primarily Monday-Friday, worked very few nights or weekends, liked to leave their shift early, etc.. I was under the assumption that the restaurant was probably running well Monday-Friday during the day hours when the manager was on duty but probably didn’t run as well when the manager wasn’t there. I needed to find out if my hunch was correct and, if so, use my findings as a way to coach the manager into doing the right thing.

The first thing I did was generate a report for the quarter. Like I thought, we had a low Guest Satisfaction Score. Then I clicked the edit button and selected Monday-Friday, open until 5:00 PM. A report was quickly generated for that timeline. Imagine my surprise when I looked at the Guest Satisfaction Score, for the days the manager was working, and it was even lower during the manager’s shifts. The results when the manager wasn’t working actually helped to bring the score up! Preferred Feedback helped me realize that our manager, and lack of leadership, WAS the problem.

PREFERRED POINTER: You may have hunches about different aspects of your business. However, try to avoid coming to conclusions until you check into those hunches. If you think you’re having a problem in the drive-thru, run a report using only drive thru surveys. If you think it’s a problem at night, do a query looking at surveys of mystery shoppers that visited at night. If you think it’s your drive-thru at night, you can easily run that query too. If you have a question about your business, go to Preferred Feedback to see what your customers are telling you.