Brewery owners have more data available to them than ever before. Point-of-sale systems can reveal what customers buy, when they buy it and how purchasing patterns change over time. Sales reports can help identify popular products, slow-moving inventory and trends across days, weeks or seasons.
But some of the information that can help a brewery make smarter decisions may never show up on a POS report.
Customer feedback — collected through a newsletter, social media, surveys or conversations in the taproom — can provide another data point. While sales numbers can show what customers are doing, direct feedback can sometimes help explain what they want, what they notice and where the brewery experience may be falling short.
“I love it. I love getting the feedback,” said Courtney Guggenberger of Guggman Haus in a recent BREWER podcast and cover story for the Indianapolis brewery. “That’s a whole other data point.”
That distinction can be important for breweries that have become increasingly reliant on measurable business metrics. Sales data can identify what is happening, but it does not always reveal why customers make certain decisions or what relatively small improvements might make them more likely to return. For Guggenberger, collecting feedback through the brewery’s newsletter created an opportunity to hear directly from customers rather than relying exclusively on secondhand comments that may be shared with staff and eventually make their way to ownership or management.
Guggman Haus received approximately 170 responses to a newsletter survey from a list of about 2,600 subscribers. The brewery’s list has been built organically, Guggenberger said, giving the responses additional value as feedback from people who had already chosen to maintain a relationship with the brewery.
Some respondents offered feedback about the brewery’s beer garden.
“There was a couple probably regulars that filled it out, and they said, ‘We love the beer garden, but have you thought about doing this?’ Or sometimes this might get overlooked in the beer garden,” Guggenberger said.
The suggestions were not necessarily revelations that management would have discovered through traditional sales data. Instead, they identified parts of the customer experience that had been overlooked while the brewery’s attention was focused elsewhere.
“We love our beer garden, but no, we haven’t thought about that because we’ve been so focused on another part of the business,” Guggenberger said.
That may be one of the more useful reasons for breweries to actively collect customer feedback. Some owners are often immersed in daily decisions involving staffing, production, sales, events and financial management. Familiarity with the business can also make it more difficult to see the experience through the eyes of someone walking into the taproom every week. Customers, particularly regulars, may notice things that ownership and management no longer see.
Guggman Haus used the feedback to make improvements to its beer garden, including adding planter boxes and planting seven small trees. Now, breweries shouldn’t implement every suggestion they receive. Customer feedback can be subjective, and one person’s request may not represent the preferences of a broader customer base. Instead, the value can come from looking for patterns.
When multiple customers identify a similar issue, or when their observations reinforce concerns that management has already discussed, feedback can help validate where to focus resources. In other cases, a single response may reveal a blind spot worth investigating.
That same approach can also be useful when planning events or making programming decisions.
As Guggman Haus planned its seventh anniversary celebration, Guggenberger used an open-ended Instagram poll to ask customers what they wanted to see. The response volume was smaller than the newsletter survey, but the answers still provided useful input.
The responses ranged from requests for a commemorative poster and the brewery’s Festbier to be on tap to larger suggestions involving activity beyond the brewery’s primary location. Not every suggestion needs to become an initiative. But open-ended questions can provide something that traditional multiple-choice surveys and sales reports cannot: ideas management may not have considered asking about in the first place.
That can make feedback a complement to existing data rather than a replacement for it. POS information may show whether a particular beer sells well. Direct customer feedback might help reveal why customers are ordering it, what they would like to see next or whether the taproom experience surrounding that purchase could be improved. A sales report may identify successful events. Feedback may reveal which elements of those events customers actually valued.
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There is also a relationship-building benefit to asking customers for their opinions. Regular customers often see the taproom as more than simply a place to purchase a product. Asking for feedback can acknowledge that relationship while giving customers an opportunity to participate in the evolution of a place they regularly visit.
“I just like to help validate some of the stuff we’re doing, and then let people know that, like, we hear them as well,” Guggenberger said. “This is a space that they come and they hang out in every week.”
For brewery decision-makers, the challenge may be creating a system that allows feedback to become useful information instead of simply becoming another stream of comments to monitor. That could mean periodically asking one focused question in a newsletter, using social media polls to test ideas or reviewing customer responses for recurring themes. It could also mean giving staff a more formal way to record observations they hear repeatedly across the bar.
The goal is not to allow the loudest customer to dictate business strategy. It’s to recognize that a brewery’s internal perspective is only one view of the customer experience.
