How Your Senior Living Community Can Use Feedback Systems to Improve Dining Services

Making the choice to enter assisted living, independent living, or any senior living community is never done lightly, and it can be a time of difficult transition for prospective residents and their family members. To make what can be seen as a life-changing decision, older adults and their loved ones look to authentic feedback to guide their path. In fact, in a recent study, over half reported researching online reviews via review sites, or seeking real reviews from current residents and family members in order to make an informed decision.

The resident experience, which includes dining, is critical to your community’s online reputation and to the satisfaction of your residents and their loved ones. You can start seeking, collecting, and leveraging resident feedback right away, in order to improve your dining services, solicit positive reviews, and increase the satisfaction of new residents and current residents alike. Here, we’ll explain how.

The Importance of Resident Feedback

It’s no exaggeration — excellent dining service improves resident experience. Residents who enjoy dining in your senior living community are happy residents. And happy residents like to share their experience, perpetuating the extremely effective word-of-mouth advertising and giving valuable referrals. But you don’t have to wait for residents to take action first and leave you a review. Or — even worse — wait until you have to respond to a negative review. You can start leveraging resident feedback right now, and use it as part of your decision-making process. 

By gathering feedback directly from your residents, you’ll be able to get a clearer picture of their likes and dislikes, their personal preferences, and how they really feel about the dining services you provide. You can then use this feedback as a powerful tool to customize and revamp your menus, find areas in which you can make improvements, and engage with your residents in an authentic and enriching way. 

Effective Methods for Gathering Resident and Family Feedback

There are a number of ways to collect feedback, and you can try out different methods until you find one that works for you and your staff. Here are a few of the most effective ways to gather resident feedback on your dining services:

-Surveys, polls, or questionnaires
- Direct feedback, resident interviews, focus groups
- Special resident committees or councils devoted to analyzing and reviewing dining services
- Suggestion boxes, tabletop forms, and manual methods of gathering written feedback
- Digital feedback collection through senior dining software or point-of-sale (POS) systems

What Kind of Feedback You Should Collect

So, you know that you can collect resident feedback to support your dining services, but the bigger question might be what kind of feedback are you looking for? As you put together questions or forms to prompt your residents, keep in mind that the information you’re looking for can vary widely depending on your goals and needs. Some of the feedback you seek may include:

- Meal or food item-specific questions
- Experiences with dining staff, servers, hosts, etc.
- Opinions on meal presentation
- Perspective on dining room and facility cleanliness, accessibility, and decor
- Variety of menus and customization of specific meals
- Accommodations for dietary restrictions, special diets, or allergies
- Suggestions for overall improvement
- Advice their healthcare providers have given them on special medical or health-focused diets
- Input on what types of alternative dining options residents would like to see
- Insights and opinions on pricing for meal plans, single meals, guest meals, and grab-and-go or pre-packaged items

What Your Community Can Do With That Feedback

The information you gather from your residents is a powerful tool you can use in many ways to improve customer experience, increase resident well-being, and eventually request reviews for prospective residents. Here are some of the ways you can leverage this feedback:

Aggregate Data and Identify Trends

Resident data is extremely valuable and is unique to your senior living or assisted living community. Once you have this data, you can compile it and analyze it to find trends in your dining service and resident satisfaction. For instance, you may discover that meal attendance goes down on Sundays when family members visit or take residents out. You can use that data to better manage your inventory, cut costs, and reduce food waste. You may also see that more residents than you would have guessed are vegetarian, so you can then incorporate more meat-free dishes into your menu rotation.

Create Actionable Insights

Based on the data you gather, you can shape your decision-making process around the trends that you’ve pinpointed, so you’re ready to take the right action. Once you learn what residents really want (or don’t want), you’ll find that it’s much easier to deliver, and you’ll see satisfaction rates improve.

Implement Changes Based on Feedback

Some of the insights you glean from resident feedback may be expected, while others are a total surprise. Some may only require small adjustments that can have a big impact. Other insights will require serious strategy, planning, and budgeting to implement. For instance, you may find from your feedback that residents would prefer a bistro dining option in addition to the traditional dining room. That will take a big effort on the part of your community and your leadership. But once you know it’s something residents are passionate about, you can start conversations with them about how to realize their ideas and satisfy their expectations.

Plan Long-Term Improvements

If you notice consistent negative feedback about your dining facilities, it could be that it’s time to start planning for a renovation down the road. Or if you hear that dining staff or servers aren’t meeting expectations, you can start to create a roadmap for increased employee training, additional hiring, or continuing education. You may not have even realized a problem was brewing until you solicited feedback, but now you have a chance to turn the tides before minor complaints become major problems.

Continuously Monitor

Asking for resident feedback isn’t a one-and-done endeavor. You’ll need to request ongoing feedback using the different methods mentioned above, focusing on different areas of concern. This also includes keeping an eye on online reviews, especially those that mention dining services, responding to negative reviews, and encouraging those with positive reviews to share with their peers.

The Role of POS Systems in Feedback Management

One efficient and seamless way to collect resident feedback is to leverage a senior living POS system. With the right software, you can collect feedback with a single swipe at every transaction. Many POS systems have the capability to collect a basic rating (often a score of 1-5 for satisfaction with a specific meal, item, or service). A good POS will also give you a report of this data in one location so you can get an overview of the general sentiment of the feedback and start looking for trends.

How to Get Started With eMenuCHOICE

You have a wealth of insights at your disposal, if you go about collecting it in the right way. Fortunately, with eMenuCHOICE, you have many avenues for collecting resident feedback at mealtime and beyond. Plus, you’ll get access to our powerful data and analytics tools, so you can see how your dining service performs, and make quick informed decisions to save money and satisfy residents. With our POS system, you can also increase revenue capture and stop leakage. Getting started is easy, and we can do it as soon as you’re ready to transform your senior dining experience. Just pick a date and we’ll schedule a chat — simple as that!