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Why I’m Not a Fan of Chili’s Tablet Kiosk

by Measure CP Staff on November 9, 2011

Several weeks ago, I went to a Chili’s restaurant for dinner.

After I sat down, before I’d even had my chips and salsa, I noticed a little touch tablet computer on the table. This is a new thing at Chili’s: This nifty little device lets you order food — queso, please! — pay for your meal, offer your insights so the company can give you better customer service in the future, even “rent” little games for your kids to play while they wait for their food to arrive.

Chili's restaurant

Image by Julep67 via Flickr

You know, in case they accidentally left their Nintendo DSes or iPod Touches in the car.

It’s an interesting concept — from a customer service perspective, it takes those the text surveys I’ve mentioned in a couple of past blog posts a couple of steps further. The table tablets definitely have their benefits: Ordering your own food leaves less room for error between the kitchen and the table; streamlining the payment process allows Chili’s to potentially turn tables more quickly; the opportunity to provide feedback on your experience immediately throughout the meal can be nothing but valuable.

But in my mind, the drawbacks to these devices definitely outweigh the benefits. Not for business reasons, but for customer experience reasons. Theoretically, people go out to restaurants as a family to talk to one another, to spend time together.

Now, this little gadget is so cool, so bright and flashy and useful and novel, that everyone at the table is going to want to play with it until dinner comes — which can be 20 or 30 minutes. But it means we’re not talking with each other or spending time interacting with each other. We’re distracted, we’re playing, and we’re not communicating.

We all have enough going on in our lives. As if the TVs in every corner of every bar and restaurant weren’t enough — restaurant patrons don’t need another distraction from their family life. I like the idea of the technology, but I worry about what it’s doing to an already distracted population.

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Where is the future of technology going for customer feedback?

by Measure CP Staff on November 8, 2011

People are always asking me what’s next in the world of customer feedback. With entire websites dedicated to the latest and greatest general technology, it’s understandable to want to know about the upcoming technologies that could help your business.
To arrive at the answer of what’s next, it helps to look at th

Listening to the Voice of the Customer - Futur...

Image by Cea. via Flickr

e path we’ve taken to get there. So let’s talk about the history of customer feedback!
The classic, of course, is the face-to-face communication that came with the simpler times of the past: happy customers bringing baked goods after a particularly pleasant shopping experience; disgruntled customers throwing down with shop owners in the town square. (That happened, right?)
The first formal method for collecting customer feedback was the comment card. There would either be a box with a slot or an address to mail the card to. Do you remember getting those cards in stores and restaurants? How often did you actually fill them out? (And, if you worked with a business that used them, do you remember the time and effort involved in actually converting those insights from illegible chicken scratch to usable customer information?)
Exactly.
Mystery shopping was next. Over the years, the process itself evolved to include audio recording, then video recording. Besides the obvious technological evolution here, mystery shopping also empowered shoppers so much more with a list of things to look for during their experience, and gave the responsibility of interpreting the data to a professional third party. All a business had to do was act on the recommendations set forth in the report.
The latest evolution has been cell phone surveys, which I’ve talked about briefly. A cross between a modern-day comment card and mystery shopping with instant results, cell phone surveys prompt customers (who have already opted in) to provide feedback on a variety of things by SMS.

It’s safe to say that customer feedback technology will correspond to technology in general, so I would venture a guess that there may be a crowd-sourced mystery shopping service sometime soon; or maybe there’ll be “an app for that”! Whatever it is, you can rest assured that I’ll find out about it and share it with you in another blog post.

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The Window to a Business’s Soul

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Company Culture > Customer Service

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Let’s play a little game, shall we? It’s called “Good Boss, Bad Boss.” Good Boss: Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos. Not only good because he spearheads a company that sells awesome shoes and gives everyone free shipping, but because he’s created an incredible company culture that revolves around keeping his employees happy and excited about [...]

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