Restaurant owners may not relish customer complaints, but they are certainly preferable to the unsatisfied customer who never returns, or even the happy customer that never mentions that an establishment is making the best sandwich in Boston. LevelUp wants to bridge that gap between eaters and feeders with the release of a new feature that allows customers to rate their experience. LevelUp didn’t invent this of course–but unlike feedback services, LevelUp feedback survey’s are available with one click from a button on the receipt.
LevelUp want to help businesses connect to their patrons, and is using in-receipt surveys to do it. Starting today, the Boston-based payments start-up will be allowing merchants to take real-time feedback from customers by grabbing post transaction data via in-app surveys. The new functionality also allows merchants to respond to customer cheers or jeers in a variety of ways electronically.
“InApp surveys is a feature we built as a direct result of the requests we received from our partners,” explained Hagan. “We’ve often found that consumers primarily post negative reviews online when they feel unable to communicate their concerns directly to a business. With inapp surveys, we’re able to provide a private, direct and immediate feedback loop between restaurants and their customers.”
Short circuit negative social media reviews before they happen is key to LevelUp’s new offering. It also solves for the problem of negativity bias in customer feedback. In countless studies the same result comes back, on the whole no matter, how nice they are, sensitive they are or even generally optimistic a human being is—human beings on the whole are more likely to remember and act on bad experiences than they are on good ones. The problem for restaurants is clear—doing a good job and making a meal customers like is less memorable than doing something wrong and angering someone. The person who ate a good meal thinks about how good the food was, the person whose meal didn’t turn out right, or who waited to long for it, they think about what they are going to write on Facebook.
According to Kate Reynolds, LevelUp’s head of marketing, because the entire payment, food procurement process and survey request all take place in a single electronic location—in this case the mobile phone—they can reach out to customers when they are still “wired in” to the experience.
“Our merchants who already started using this are really are seeing great feedback, which is great. Obviously its not all great, but they are seeing very positive reviews and that helps them out too—it’s important to know what your customers do like.”
In the even of a less than thrilled customer, the app also let’s a merchant get back in touch to help med the relationship. This can be done through discounts, reward points or just a personal follow up that let the customer know that their concerns will be addressed.
The new site also has searchable feature for merchants, so that they can take a more drilled down look at the survey data
“The new tool let’s merchants search in a variety of ways—most basically separating good reviews from bad ones – so merchants can actually use these survey to get very specific information on their business.
A New Twist On An Existing Idea
LevelUp is not the inventor of the survey attached to the payment method of helping merchants reach out to their client base. Square launched a similar feature for their dining app earlier this year, and Dunkin Donuts has for some years tried to entice consumers to their website with an offer of a free donut for those who fill out the survey.
What makes LevelUp’s version of this program mainly different, however, is its one step nature. In the case of the Square merchant feedback took, users are not able to respond directly from their receipt—they must go somewhere else to offer feedback.
LevelUp’s new feature turns this into a one-click, one screen experience. The survey button exists at the bottom of the e-receipt, customers who want to take it have only to click and go.
The service is also less expensive than Square’s version, at $5 dollars per month; access to survey data is about 50 percent less expensive through LevelUp.
Today, the program goes live in another 30 business in the Boston area and becomes available to LevelUp merchants (and future merchants) and widely today. To get a sneak peak at what the product looks like, see below.
LevelUp COO Michael Hagan shared his guide to ibeacon etiquette.
Click here to see the press release.
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