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Belhaven Pubs - Guest Feedback
"ViewPoint is helping us drive a service culture" Stuart Watt - Commercial Director, Belhaven Pubs
Overview
Belhaven Pubs is based in Scotland and runs an estate of more than 300 leased, tenanted and managed pubs. The company recently developed a new pub dining brand called Eating Inn, which caters predominantly for families.
The ambition was to fill a gap in mid-market family dining with a contemporary environment, great food and fantastic service.
The brand is a critical part of Belhaven's growth plan and its early success in Scotland has been such that it is now being rolled out as a national brand within Greene King, its highly respected parent company.
The Challenge
With an initial estate of seven Eating Inns spread across Scotland - from Kilmarnock to Aberdeen - monitoring and improving standards was a priority for the company's senior management team, who wanted to drive repeat custom and positive guest recommendation.
Feedback cards, an online comments section on the company's website and a mystery guest shopper programme were all in use.
Whilst these were useful applications in understanding customer experience, inevitably there were delays in processing the cards and the website feedback. The mystery shopper programme also had limitations in terms of frequency of customer insight.
Belhaven needed a system that allowed customers to feed back at the table in greater numbers, together with a robust, manageable data collection and reporting process.
The Solution
A number of providers were investigated but Belhaven chose CRT's ViewPoint Tablet PCs because they were the most practical and user-friendly solution.
Staff members at the sites take the portable devices to the table at the end of each meal and ask the guests for feedback on their experience. The questionnaire has a mixture of simple yes/no responses together with space for free text comments.
The 'yes/no' responses deliver quantitative and objective data which tracks trends on a number of categories across the brand. The free text facility provides invaluable subjective feedback by site on emerging issues.
Critically, the capture of customer data allows Eating Inn to connect with guests to promote the business and generate more return revenue.
The Operations Manager believed that the ViewPoint tablets provided sufficient benefit to ask for more Tablet PCs for food-led sites outside of Eating Inn.
"ViewPoint has been a useful tool for pub managers and the senior management team" commented Stuart Watt, Commercial Director of Belhaven Pubs. "One of the benefits of employing CRT was that our staff quickly became more conscious of what good service was all about, as they took the Tablet PC units to the customers and actively sought feedback.
"As a result, the visibility and profile of customer service has increased dramatically and, due to improvements that have been implemented, our pub teams enjoy higher gratuities than before. This has led to improved staff retention and helped us embed a stronger service culture. It's a bit of a virtuous circle really."
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Click here to download Belhaven Pubs Case Study PDF |
