Every semester, the Office of Residential and Dining Services (RDS) sends out a mass email encouraging the student body to complete a comprehensive dining survey. As a student, it is important to understand how the survey is created and whether or not your opinions are taken into consideration. The Stute spoke with Madison Goslin, Senior Marketing Specialist for Dining Services, to understand how the voice of the student body impacts dining on campus.
The dining survey is created by a third-party company, Innovative Hospitality Solutions (IHS). Stevens has little to no say about what is asked on the survey because IHS’s job entails auditing the school as well as maintaining the quality and service of the dining experience on campus.
Once the survey results are in, IHS creates a lengthy presentation with all the statistics and presents it semesterly to the RDS Office. Goslin also creates her own presentation and highlights the largest issues that arose in the current semester. They both propose certain changes based on the student body’s responses and create a joint solution plan to fix the enumerated problems. IHS also works with many other colleges and universities across the country, so when some aspect of the dining experience is ranked unusually low, they can also compare those results to other campuses to find an explanation.
Goslin assured that the relationship with Innovative Hospitality Solutions allows for changes in the best interest of the school and its students. Stevens can not simply make decisions to change certain aspects to the dining halls, since they have to run it by IHS and IHS has to run their changes by Stevens.
The survey consists of seven categories that IHS believes to be what makes or breaks the dining experience at a university. These seven categories include Communication/Outreach/Marketing, Customer Service and Hospitality, Dining Atmosphere, Food Quality and Variety, Hours of Operation, Ordering Technology, and Value and Promotions.
The survey goes down the list of categories and asks if the student is satisfied or dissatisfied with the overall experience in all of the dining halls. It then goes into detail and asks if all these categories were met for the specific halls, which include America’s Cup, Cannon Cafe, Pierce Cafe, Pierce Dining Hall, Pi Kitchen, all UCC Marketplace stalls, and delivery from outside restaurants via the Stevens Grubhub app. From that point on, there are two short response questions that invite the student to expound on elements of the dining experience that satisfied or failed to satisfy his expectations.
This year’s survey is significantly shorter than in past semesters. Goslin shared that the length of the survey was found to have harmed response rates and that out of about 3000 students on the meal plan last year, only 905 responses were collected. To combat this problem, IHS decided to make the survey more appealing and easier for students to complete, now only taking approximately four minutes from start to finish.
When asked how each student’s opinions or complaints were taken into consideration, Goslin mentioned that most data-analyzing software catches common words or themes and groups them. These commonly grouped words are looked over and addressed in those semesterly meetings. If students do not fill out the form, there are no complaints to group together and address! It is important to fill out the form, and chances are, if you have a complaint, someone else has the same one.
Every change that is made is influenced by the student’s survey responses. So fill out the form, be honest, be critical, and voice your complaints so that they can be properly addressed!
Access and complete the dining survey at https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/VJQDL9X.
