How Text Analysis Helps Restaurants Identify Customer Issues

Restaurants receive huge amounts of feedback from customers — in survey responses, via social media, on review sites, and more. This unstructured feedback — text responses about your restaurant — holds valuable insights into what’s going right or wrong at your locations, all of which drives repeat visitors, retention, and loyalty.

But the sorting, tagging, and analysis are obstacles to understanding that feedback, and to making it valuable to your business.

For instance, recent research for SOCi reveals that restaurants receive more reviews on Google than just about any brick-and-mortar business category, with the average chain or franchise restaurant location having about 1,500 reviews. That’s a lot of unstructured feedback.

But 1,500 reviews, plus thousands of survey responses, not to mention social media mentions, is unmanageable for most businesses. How do you derive value and make a measurable impact from unstructured feedback?

How Restaurants Can Respond to Unstructured Feedback 

Restaurant owners have a few options when it comes to this unstructured text feedback.

Don’t collect qualitative data. Some restaurant owners have forced their customers to deliver their feedback using radio buttons or check box questions. But these miss the richness of customer feedback. Radio buttons can’t encompass the entirety of the customer experience.

Collect qualitative feedback, but don’t do much with it. Restaurant owners may opt to collect qualitative feedback in open text boxes, but thanks to the size and complexity, many find this analysis unmanageable. They may pay an employee to manually tag feedback with sentiment data (is it positive or negative?). This can give a general indication when you are on the wrong or right path, but it does not deliver insights teams can use, plus is ripe with bias.

Use text analysis to segment customer feedback and understand how customers really feel. Text analysis is an emerging technology that uses AI to analyze and measure sentiment and themes found in open text responses. Text analysis quickly summarizes large volumes of feedback, identifies and quantifies the themes/sentiments, and provides visibility into the combined analysis of cross-channel feedback sources.

The Benefits of Text Analysis for Restaurants

Text analysis helps you summarize and understand what people say in unstructured open text responses, and why they say it.

There are three main benefits for restaurants when it comes to using text analysis. Text analysis enables you to:

• Quickly summarize large amounts of open text feedback and identify the themes and sentiments present in that text — and turn your qualitative feedback into quantitative data.
• See a combined, comprehensive analysis of open-ended text feedback from all your feedback channels.
• Unlock a new way to learn about your audience without assumptions, biases, or defined boundaries, and generate new data, insights, and opportunities based on unstructured feedback collection.

Feedback is personal and unstructured open text is the most valuable of all pieces of feedback because it is in the customer’s words and truly reflects their experience. Text analysis helps you crunch those words into numbers, so you can properly take action.

Why Restaurant Owners are Adopting Text Analysis

Knowing that unstructured feedback is the most valuable for your business, but previously unmanageable, restaurant owners may ask: Why should I start using a text analysis platform?

The answers are simple. Text analysis helps restaurant owners do the following:

Gain clarity: Understand exactly how your audience really thinks and feels — in their own words.

Make the right decision: Instantly turn qualitative feedback data into trackable, actionable insights.

Solve the problem: Analyze and act on open text feedback faster than ever, at unheard-of scale.

Are customers complaining in your surveys about the service? What do they think about the menu on social media? How can I improve the guest experience based on what previous guests have said? Now, with text analysis, those answers are instantly revealed.

Text analysis can take all of that unstructured open text feedback — from surveys, social media, review sites, and more — and make sense of it for your business. You’ve heard all about AI already — this is a practical AI application that impacts your bottom line.