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Where o’ where do the comment cards go
April 12, 2011 by
Brunst-McNaboe
If you’ve been to a Rams Head restaurant, we hope that you’ve had the opportunity to fill out a comment card detailing your visit to our facility. The comment cards themselves are pretty basic… name, address, email, date of your visit, rate your experience, who was your server & what would you do to improve. But, what happens to these notes filled with your valuable insight? Do you wonder if anyone ever sees them?
For a small piece of paper our comment cards actually travel quite the distance within the Rams Head walls…
Our comment cards are printed at our neighboring print shop, Sir Speedy on West Street (shop local!). They are then delivered to our various restaurants by way of the Kyle & Erin shuttle express. The manager inserts them into the check presenters where they are housed until they arrive at your table. Our hope is that you fill them out and give them back to the server, who returns them to the manager. The manager then reads them, responds (if needed) & makes changes or praises (as needed) and they are hand delivered to my office in Annapolis where I review. Afterwards, we collect them and then send them to our Microsoft Excel guru Miss Madison at our Savage location who types in your email info to get you loaded into our e-marketing database. And then they are recycled.
I read through each and every comment card for all of our locations. I look for advertising trends (how did you hear about us?) and food trends (“I am very dissapointed to find out that the crab puffs were removed from the menu”) and often get a kick out of the some of the responses which may, or may not, have been written after a few cocktails.
There are quite a few themes that prevail no matter what the location, the year or the author: free beer for all, server X deserves a raise and I’m always shocked at the alarming number of requests for pole dancers?!?
We of course love the praises of our servers or food or better yet, both! After all, we are in the business of service and it’s what we strive to accomplish each and every day we open our doors:
We often receive great bits of advice, which we try and take into account when strategizing for the future. I wish everyone left their contact information to allow me the opportunity to respond. For this comment, I would tell them that we rotate our menu every 6 months. So while not quite every 4 months as requested, we are getting in a regular rotation:
And of course we wouldn’t ask the question, if we couldn’t take the heat. But as a small business, sometimes it’s hard to not to be hurt by some of the responses/comments, especially when you feel as though the customer’s perception is not in line with the company reality:
After taking a humbling moment, I realize that this is a review of my job – I must not be telling out story well enough, clear often or often enough in the ways that we are supporting our local community that surrounds us. That perhaps I need to toot our own horn a little louder about our involvement & countless volunteer hours with Special Olympics of Maryland, The Chad William Muehlhauser Education Fund at the Baltimore Aquarium, the Toys for Tots, AM|FM fund, Annapolis Business Association, Annapolis Restaurant Week, Annapolis West Street Association to name a few. In essence, I need to do a better job of telling our volunteer story.
This reminds me of a wise quote from Ryder Carrier Management Brian Koval, “Lessons are usually where you look for them. You can learn something from anyone.” Imagine the lessons I’m learning each week with your comment cards – thank you for giving me a weekly dose of Rams Head education.
Until next time… enjoy some Food, Fun & Beer.
Erin
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