SurveyDining.com offers a delicious way to boost restaurant profits for $49 per month

open source nextanalytics engine drives survey results

Sigler has a 15-year background as a Chief Learning Officer, Chief Technology Officer and Enterprise Information Systems Manager at several Canadian technology companies including a publicly traded survey firm. His newest start-up, Direct Loyalty Corp., offers an easy, cost-effective way to supplement a restaurateur’s instinct with independent customer opinion.

Priced at $49 a month, SurveyDining.com is a hosted online service that automatically analyzes customers’ responses to survey questions about their restaurant experience. “Our mission,” says Sigler, “is to help restaurants measure and increase customer loyalty.”

SurveyDining.com accomplishes this mission using state-of-the art Web technology that provides weekly loyalty trend reports and forwards real-time customer alerts if a “disappointing” rating comes in or a customer requests contact on a specific issue. “This gives restaurateurs an opportunity to correct a problem immediately before a customer starts telling their friends about a bad experience,” says Sigler. “Instead, with fast action and a satisfactory conclusion, they’ll be bringing their friends to the restaurant for their next meal.”

To entice restaurant customers to use the survey system, SurveyDining.com offers branded table tent-cards and receipt reminders featuring an invitation to a three-minute survey in return for a discount or bonus (a free entrée or dessert, for example). Customers can rate server attentiveness, food variety, style and décor, value for money, wait times and a number of other factors that determine overall loyalty.

Restaurateurs can consult weekly loyalty trend reports delivered by email, or they can log into SurveyDining.com as often as they like to see how they’re doing during a specific busy period or promotion. They can also consult their restaurant’s own “executive dashboard”, including a series of color-coded reports.

“Our goal with SurveyDining.com’s technology is simplicity and power,” says Sigler. “What restaurateurs see is actionable information on the loyalty metrics that matter. Running behind that is a sophisticated business analytics software program called nextanalytics that I selected based on my many years evaluating and implementing enterprise information systems for both large and small companies.”

A cross-platform (Java/UNIX and .NET/Windows) product, nextanalytics 3.0 can query millions of cells of data in sub-second time, offering more than 100 powerful business analytics functions that would require custom programming in BI platforms, and often aren’t possible with spreadsheet macro programming.

An open source product that emulates MySQL pricing of $595 per server per year, key portions of nextanalytics source code is included with every download (free to registered users wishing to try before they buy). This made nextanalytics freely and easily customizable by SurveyDining.com to integrate into a solution inexpensively with low risk.

Yaternick is a Business Intelligence entrepreneur who spent 25 years in the BI industry, including key development roles at Cognos Inc., OLAP@Work Inc., and Business Objects Inc.  In 2003, Yaternick founded Ottawa-based nextanalytics corp. with the mandate to deliver innovations in BI with a focus on analytics.

“We’re actively soliciting a community of third-party consultants, ISVs, and developers like David Sigler to offer services and products that employ nextanalytics to do their data integration and processing,” says Yaternick. “We have a great business analytics technology and an open-source inspired, community-driven Web site with extensive video demos and code examples that make it easy to work with nextanalytics. Any dev shop can distinguish themselves and make money with our software as their analytics engine.”