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The initial results are in from Working Draft Beer Comapny's customer questionnaire.
Some area breweries are looking to their customers for advice on how to reopen in a way that will keep everyone safe, at ease and happy.
The Great Dane Pub and Brewing and Working Draft Beer Company sent out questionnaires to their mailing lists in mid-May. Both were inspired by a questionnaire sent out by Monday Night Brewing of Atlanta, referenced in an April 28 post from the Brewers Association about the re-establishment of “on-premise” drinking and dining.
Great Dane marketing specialist Alyssa Harms says she read Monday Night’s blog post explaining the results of its survey and immediately began coming up with her own questions for the Great Dane. “The Great Dane has always been a part of the community, and safety is our number one concern. We wouldn’t want to reopen without taking our guest’s opinions into consideration.”
Working Draft co-owner Ryan Browne also liked the idea of the customer survey. “It made a ton of sense to me,” Browne writes in an email. “It seems like everyone's comfort level, risk threshold, sources of information, and expectations run along a continuum, and if we can get a clearer sense of where most of our guests are on that continuum, we can better adapt our operations as they come back.”
Questions on both the Great Dane’s survey and the Working Draft survey included asking for a guesstimate of when a customer’s next dine-in trip might be (with such responses as “the first half of June,” “the second half of June,” “sometime in July” and “August or later”; whether customers plan to continue to use delivery and takeout once dining in is again a possibility; and a raft of questions about which safety measures are most important going forward, from “reduced overall capacity” to “temperature checks for customers.”
Additionally, the Great Dane asked if being open 9 p.m. to midnight for drinks only would be popular. Working Draft asked about continuing virtual events and several more open-ended questions about what customers want once the taproom is reopened.
Harms says that upper level staff at the Great Dane, including the kitchen managers, general managers and the brewmasters, are currently evaluating the responses, although the public is still welcome to fill out the survey. The Dane does not yet have a target date for reopening, says Harms.
Working Draft has already published preliminary results from its first survey on its website as an infographic.
“Adequately spaced seating” was the most important safety measure people wanted, followed by “outdoor seating,” “reduced overall capacity” and “complimentary hand sanitizer.”
While about 40% of the 234 respondents said they might make a trip to Working Draft in June, more than 50% chose July or “August or later.”
Browne is currently tweaking questions and coming up with more for a second survey due out soon, before any plans are set for in-house drinking and dining.
In a newsletter sent out today, Working Draft writes that the initial survey contributed to the decision to “not resume taproom operations for the moment. We will continue to monitor and reevaluate the situation on a bi-weekly basis.”
