What do your customers actually think of your pub? Are you winning or losing customers? If you're losing customers are you sure you understand the reasons why? What if you have strengths, but also weaknesses? Do you know what the weaknesses are and are you addressing them?
The starting point in answering these questions is having a mechanism in place for getting honest customer feedback.
The pub trade may have reached an historic moment this week as it searches for ways to harness the power of the web to create a virtuous circle of service improvement. The website www.useyourlocal.com started off in an unusual fashion. Heineken staffer Stuart Mills harboured an off-beat idea on his laptop, which he presented to his bosses in a Dragons' Den-style competition. Why not set up a website that encourages the use of pubs by having them serve as drop-off points for parcels?
Heineken chiefs were so impressed with Mills's idea that they made him redundant. But they also offered him funding to create the website he had imagined. Now, 18 months on, Mills is expanding the scope of www.useyourlocal.com by broadening its use in a way that offers enormous potential.
Pub customers will be able to score all pubs in the UK and the quality of the drink they serve. The scores will be made available to licensees and provide the chance to track, in real-time, what customers think of their visit to the boozer.
The expansion of the website has won the backing of sector big hitters Diageo and Coca-Cola Enterprises alongside original funder Heineken. These major brands are rightly obsessed with the quality with which their products are served.
They sense that this innovative scheme could provide clarity of insight on what's good and what's not so good in service standards for themselves and licensees alike.
Some licensees may feel nervous about customers scoring their pub on a public forum. As I've argued before, it's the wrong way to view this. Your customers — current and lapsed — will have strong views on your pub anyway and will be sharing them with anyone who cares to ask. It's far better to find out how you are rated than be ignorant of this on-going, real-world discussion about the merits of your pub.
Says Mills: "We love pubs and we want them to be amazing places — giving people the power to score pubs and the quality of their drink shows how seriously the industry takes their opinions."
Service is the final frontier for the pub trade. It consistently lags behind the service on offer in restaurants and needs to plug the satisfaction gap that too often occurs. Here is a clever way to show customers that the industry really cares about what they think. It is, put simply, a Really Good Idea. Well done, Stuart.