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Fazer Food Services have considered designing a new feedback system for their 1200 restaurants in the Nordic countries. To support the design work, the students of the School of Business were challenged to determine what kind of feedback system would work best in the catering and service organisation. Student of strategy Susanna Purhonen and student of management and international business Miila Leisiö took on the challenge.

‘We began by comparing centralised feedback systems in other widespread catering services and service organisations. This provided a base for making recommendations for successful quality management and the collection and analysis of customer feedback’, says Susanna.

‘After the comparative study, we focused on literature and made related observations. Finally, we conducted interviews in two different lunch restaurants of Fazer Food Services. Through this, we strived to increase our understanding of what the restaurant guests think of the existing feedback channels. We wanted to find out how guests perceived the communication with Fazer Food Services and their restaurants and restaurant staff. Did they feel that they would benefit from a more two-way communication?’ Miila continues.

Very useful familiarisation with text analytics

‘Student projects in real-life businesses are especially rewarding in that they prepare students for the working life. They also provide students with different analytical skills. In this particular project, the students were able to review text analytics, whose role in decision-making will certainly grow in the future’, says the Academic advisor of the project, Postdoctoral Researcher Jani Merikivi.

The tailored enterprise project took place from December 2017 to March 2018. Fazer Food Services Research Manager Johanna Koskenkorva-Tapiala thinks that working with Aalto University students and staff was refreshing. ‘This project was a good start for cooperative projects in the future’, she says. Students, on the other hand, felt that working on the project was interesting and educational. ‘It was a great experience to make use of knowledge we have learned and to work on a real-life project’, they commented.