Dr. Melissa Hughes, author, speaker, and neuroscience expert, joins Give an Ovation to break down how the brain interprets guest experiences—and what operators can do to make those impressions count. With a deep understanding of cognitive science, Melissa shares why guests remember bad moments more vividly than good ones, and how leaders can flip that script with empathy, awareness, and smart service recovery.

Understanding the Negativity Bias (2:20)

“The brain is wired to remember the bad more than the good.” – Dr. Melissa Hughes

Melissa introduces the concept of negativity bias and how it shapes customer memories. Even a great meal can be overshadowed by a loud dining room or an indifferent server. Awareness of these subconscious tendencies is the first step to improving experiences.

Why Noise Can Kill a Mood (4:05)

“Noise pollution is emotional pollution.” – Dr. Melissa Hughes

Sound affects our brains more than we think. Melissa explains how chaotic environments can overwhelm guests and taint even exceptional food or service. Tuning in to the sensory experience can lead to more meaningful guest satisfaction.

The Art of Responding to Reviews (6:10)

“Responding with empathy can turn a critic into a loyal fan.” – Dr. Melissa Hughes

Melissa outlines how responses to negative feedback aren’t just damage control—they’re opportunities to build trust. She offers guidance on using neuroscience to frame replies that connect and diffuse defensiveness.

Dig Into the Data—Emotionally (9:45)

“There’s truth in every review, even if it’s wrapped in emotion.” – Dr. Melissa Hughes

Instead of dismissing extreme reviews, Melissa encourages leaders to look deeper. Emotional intensity can be a signal of unmet expectations—and a roadmap for improvement.

Turning Mistakes Into Loyalty (12:00)

“Service recovery is more powerful than perfect service.” – Dr. Melissa Hughes

Mistakes happen—but what happens next can define your brand. Melissa shares how genuine recovery and ownership light up the same brain centers as joy, strengthening guest loyalty.

Who Deserves an Ovation? (16:10)

Melissa gives an ovation to hospitality professionals who lead with empathy and put people first—creating emotional safety for teams and unforgettable experiences for guests.

Transcript

00:00:00:04 – 00:00:22:07

Zack Oates

Welcome to another edition of Give an Ovation, the Restaurant Guest Experience podcast, where I talk to industry experts to get their strategies and tactics you can use to create a five star guest experience. This podcast is sponsored by ovation, an operations and guest recovery platform for multi-unit restaurants that gives all the answers without annoying guests with all the questions.

00:00:22:11 – 00:00:45:03

Zack Oates

Learn more at ovation up.com. And today we have Doctor Melissa Hughes with us. She’s a keynote speaker. She’s an author. She’s a self proclaimed neuroscience geek. But she is all about the science of neuro. And she’s written some amazing articles, some great books, and super excited to have you on the podcast. Melissa, how are you today?

00:00:45:05 – 00:00:48:17

Melissa Hughes

I am great. Thank you for having me. I’m super excited to be here.

00:00:48:19 – 00:01:13:21

Zack Oates

Now this is going to be a unique podcast because normally we have people that come on and they talk about the guest experience from a restaurant perspective. And while you do have quite a bit of restaurant experience, especially through marriage, Christopher is being your husband and he’s he’s awesome guy, just an amazing restaurant veteran. But you come at it from a neuroscience perspective.

00:01:14:01 – 00:01:19:09

Zack Oates

First of all, what got you into neuroscience in the first place?

00:01:19:11 – 00:01:46:18

Melissa Hughes

Well, so my roots are in education. I started my career in a fourth grade classroom, and at the end of that first year, I sat down with my mentor, kind of did a little postmortem. What do I need to work on for next year? And my overarching question was, how can I be a great teacher if I don’t understand how the brain works and how the brain learns, and those factors that impact creativity and problem solving, all those places in the brain that we want our kids to hang up.

00:01:46:20 – 00:02:19:09

Melissa Hughes

Right. So I’m going to fast forward a whole bunch of years. And that was actually where my journey in neuroscience research began. And as I traveled along that path called life, what I discovered was that understanding how the brain works is far more important. After you leave the classroom, because there’s no teacher guiding you to the right answers, or to how to learn or what to learn, and all things being equal, we all have the same access to information.

00:02:19:09 – 00:02:38:11

Melissa Hughes

Now, if you have internet access, you can get the information you need. So the difference between the best of us and the rest of us is understanding what’s going on up here and how to create the conditions we need to get our mind to do what we want it to do. That’s how I got here.

00:02:38:13 – 00:02:49:09

Zack Oates

Your quest for a PhD in this, though. I mean, like, it’s one thing to be like, hey, this is interesting, but how did you decide? Oh, no, I think I want to do a PhD.

00:02:49:11 – 00:03:13:15

Melissa Hughes

So I was that geek in school. I didn’t want to know what it took to get an A. I wanted to know what it took to get an A plus know. And I just loved learning. And when I really kind of dove into the neuroscience of how we think. And it wasn’t just how the brain works and how we think, that fascinated me.

00:03:13:15 – 00:03:40:24

Melissa Hughes

It was the way the brain works that fascinated me. Like, why are we so irrational sometimes? Why is it that when we go into a restaurant, the food can be amazing, but we walk out of that restaurant and we have a negative perception of the experience? What is it that made that happen? So that’s just one example of there are lots of factors that influence our perception that we are not even aware of.

00:03:41:02 – 00:04:00:17

Melissa Hughes

Most of our thought processes, most of our brain function happens in our subconscious. And so until you really start to dig into that and figure out what is it that’s making me irritated about this meal, I mean, it has nothing to do with the steak in the baked potato. The steak in the baked potato are fantastic, but I’m irritated about this meal now.

00:04:00:17 – 00:04:23:11

Melissa Hughes

What I know is maybe it’s the noise because restaurant noise is the biggest complaint among guests, and that is the thing that can really create a negative perception of the meal. Now the noise has nothing to do with the quality of the food, or where it’s prepared, or even the way it’s served to you, the server, the chef.

00:04:23:11 – 00:04:29:01

Melissa Hughes

They did all their jobs, but still noise creates this negative perception.

00:04:29:03 – 00:04:52:08

Zack Oates

Interesting. So there’s all of these other things going on that formulate this guest experience. And I always tell people, you have to get a thousand things right in order to have a good experience, but one thing wrong can really outweigh it. Unless, of course, you have some kind of a personal connection to either the brand, the manager there, somebody working there.

00:04:52:14 – 00:05:14:12

Zack Oates

Once you build that personal connection, there’s more that could be forgiven. But if I’m going into a restaurant and I’m paying $50 for a meal for me and my kids, I want to make sure that I’m getting what I’m paying for. And I’m having the experience that I expected when I go to McDonald’s into the play area, I’m expecting there to be a lot of noise, right?

00:05:14:14 – 00:05:20:22

Zack Oates

What I’m not expecting is for them to put onions on my burger when I specifically asked for no onions.

00:05:20:24 – 00:05:50:21

Melissa Hughes

So two things are happening there, right? So the first thing is what you mentioned is that one negative thing or right, all the positive things that happen in that experience. Right. And that is an ancestral hand-me-down. We are wired to tune in to the negative. It’s called the negativity bias. And that’s why we’ve survived like a bazillion years because when their caveman ancestors were walking through the tundra, they didn’t pay attention to the rustling in the bushes.

00:05:50:21 – 00:06:22:04

Melissa Hughes

It could mean like the end for them, right? So that was hardwired into us, and we just kept it. And so now we’re not escaping saber tooth tigers. But the brain is amazing as it is. It doesn’t actually differentiate between psychological threat and physical threat. So that physical threat has carried over. And as our brains have evolved now we know what psychological threat feels like and the brain does the same thing is always on the lookout for that negative thing.

00:06:22:04 – 00:06:27:18

Melissa Hughes

Where’s the danger? What can hurt me physically or psychologically?

00:06:27:20 – 00:06:39:16

Zack Oates

Interesting, because data shows that people are three times more likely to leave a negative review than a positive one. Right? And so that’s that that negativity bias that you’re talking about. So what can on tours do to combat that?

00:06:39:18 – 00:07:26:22

Melissa Hughes

Well, when I am talking to restaurant tours I always say that negative review is a gift. Oh total gift. So here’s the thing. The person that walked out of your restaurant who is irritated because of the noise, or because I know they they got French fries instead of a baked potato or whatever their irritation is. That review is your chance to not just make a personal connection with one of a bazillion customers that you have over the course of the week, it’s your chance to tell the whole world how you feel when one of your customers expects sessions are not met, because here’s what I think people kind of miss in the negative reviews thing.

00:07:26:24 – 00:07:52:00

Melissa Hughes

I don’t think people expect restaurants to be perfect. We know restaurants are not going to be perfect. We know things happen, but they expect that the restaurant will listen to me when I have a complaint. And like you said, people are three times more likely to sit down and pound out a negative review. And I’ve been there. I mean, I’ve done that too, right?

00:07:52:02 – 00:08:14:20

Melissa Hughes

But the part that is the most telling is after that negative review is written, how does the restaurant respond? Yes. If the restaurant doesn’t respond at all, that’s worse. If the restaurant comes back and says, we are just a lunatic, I don’t need your business anyway, okay, that’s awful. But in both of those cases, you’re going to lose me as a customer.

00:08:14:22 – 00:08:34:23

Melissa Hughes

But what is also happening is every other person that chucks the reviews before they try your restaurant is going to see that either you respond to like an ass or you didn’t respond at all. And so as a new customer, I’m like, well, they don’t care when things they don’t care.

00:08:34:23 – 00:08:36:03

Zack Oates

Yeah.

00:08:36:05 – 00:08:58:11

Melissa Hughes

But if you sit down and write a thoughtful response and I wrote a blog post about here’s the anatomy of a thoughtful response to a bad review like, it’s not that hard. It’s really pretty simple. All people want is to be heard, and they want to be acknowledged that things didn’t go as planned. And if you do that, then people are much more forgiving.

00:08:58:13 – 00:09:07:03

Melissa Hughes

And also they’re much more likely to think the restaurant’s okay. It’s the person that wrote that review must be a nutjob.

00:09:07:05 – 00:09:31:14

Zack Oates

Yeah, and that’s the thing, Melissa, is that when I look at public reviews, it’s really hard to win people back who have left a public review. But the thing is, is that I say 5% of it is winning back. That individual customer, 95% is sharing your story, is making sure that when people read that, they read that, number one, you’re human, you acknowledge it, you understand it.

00:09:31:16 – 00:09:50:02

Zack Oates

You wrote this great article. The one that you reference is turning negative reviews into loyal guests. And when you talk about it, it’s like number one is hearing the customer. Number two is taking responsibility. Even if the guest was partially at fault, is what you say. And number three is offer a solution of we’d love to invite you back and make this right.

00:09:50:04 – 00:10:16:05

Zack Oates

And when you look at this, the problem with online reviews when you’re posting this publicly is a lot of people say, I don’t want people to know that if they leave a negative review, that I’m going to give out a free hamburger. And that’s one of the reasons that that we created ovation was because we want to make sure that if you can keep it private, and if you can track who that guest is, it’s so much more powerful because you don’t have to wonder in the back of your mind, are they just trying to get something for free?

00:10:16:07 – 00:10:47:23

Zack Oates

You actually posted how did not respond to a negative review. And this owner kind of goes unhinged and he’s like, oh, it’s all about the money. But if you’re able to track, how often has that person complained with us and if it’s their first time ever complaining and they’ve been in ten times and we treat them like they’re trying to steal our kids college tuition, then yeah, it’s going to paint a really bad picture for the person reading that response and for the person who’s giving you that feedback.

00:10:47:23 – 00:11:11:01

Zack Oates

Because at the end of the day, 99% of feedback, there’s truth in there. There’s honesty. There’s something that honestly betrayed their trust. They trusted to have an experience with your brand and they didn’t get it. And so they have that primeval betrayal feeling, and they want to feel heard. They want justice, right.

00:11:11:01 – 00:11:44:04

Melissa Hughes

Right, right. And you mentioned earlier you mentioned expectations. And it is all about trust and expectations. And that particular example of that restaurant that I actually clicked, I clipped the I Chris screenshotted the review and included that in my article. And here’s what I want restaurant owners to pay attention to. And that particular case, if you look at that restaurant, there is scathing review after scathing review after scathing review, and they’re not all the same person.

00:11:44:04 – 00:12:09:15

Melissa Hughes

And so as a restaurant person, I’m like, okay, if everyone’s carping about the weight, like I had a 715 reservation, I didn’t get it into like 15. Then that’s my cue to pay attention to how I’m scheduling reservations. Right? If one person has a bad experience with the wait time, maybe it’s that person. Maybe it was an off night.

00:12:09:15 – 00:12:30:18

Melissa Hughes

Maybe something happened to the reservation. But you know, those are the kinds of things that a guest who’s looking at reviews to decide, do I want to come and spend $100 at your place on Friday night? If everybody’s kind of complaining about the wait time, then I’m going to be like, they have a terrible wait time. Everybody’s complaining about it.

00:12:30:18 – 00:12:49:17

Melissa Hughes

If one person complains about it, I’m going to forgive that. That’s not a big deal. And this case, if you go to that particular restaurant tours, reviews, I mean, this was like one of the lamest reviews out of the criticisms there. I mean, I want to just call him and say, dude, like, what.

00:12:49:17 – 00:12:51:11

Zack Oates

Happened in your childhood.

00:12:51:13 – 00:13:13:18

Melissa Hughes

Right? And he’s in my backyard. I’m in Naples, Florida, and he’s in my backyard. And in that particular review, it was written by someone who lives here year round. And also, if you read the edit, the update of that review, the person said, I’m never coming back, but that’s not who you have to worry about. I’m going to tell every person I know about my experience.

00:13:13:20 – 00:13:33:18

Melissa Hughes

Now flip that around. Had he just responded thoughtfully and he didn’t have to give anything away, just come on back and introduce yourself when you come back. I really want to meet you. I want to apologize in person. Maybe there’s not even a free burger right then. Now she’s going to say, you know what? I went in here just himself to me.

00:13:33:18 – 00:13:47:07

Melissa Hughes

Or is he’s a really nice guy. Must have been an off night. I love that place now. It’s such a gift. It’s such a gift because it’s an opportunity to publicly tell everybody else how you handle guests.

00:13:47:10 – 00:14:10:15

Zack Oates

And what’s so incredible is they’ve done studies. That’s called the service recovery paradox. And it shows that a guest who has a negative experience with proper service recovery is more likely to become loyal than a guest who never had that service failure in the first place. And in fact, when we look at our data, we’re able to see that that guest actually is twice as likely to come back.

00:14:10:17 – 00:14:34:08

Zack Oates

When they do come back, they come back four times more frequently. They spend more money on each subsequent visit, and they’re 12 times more likely to leave you a five star review on a next visit. And so what we found is that quantifying that one recovered guest is worth 24 average guests. Yeah. And I tell people all the time, it’s not that you need to manufacture mistakes.

00:14:34:08 – 00:14:55:11

Zack Oates

They’re going to happen organically. It’s about having that safety net and it’s about handling it properly to make sure that you have the proper service recovery. And one of the biggest things that we found is that if you’re texting a guest or you’re responding to a review, if you want it to be super powerful, use your name and use their name.

00:14:55:16 – 00:14:56:09

Melissa Hughes

Yes.

00:14:56:09 – 00:15:18:22

Zack Oates

By just saying, hey Melissa, I’m Zach, the owner of Zach Shack. I just wanted to say I am so sorry that you had an hour long wait. We obviously messed up. We were super slammed that night. Not how we want to portray it. I would love to invite you back in and give you our regular five star experience, right?

00:15:18:22 – 00:15:20:15

Melissa Hughes

Yeah, absolutely.

00:15:20:19 – 00:15:35:23

Zack Oates

I’m not asking you to rewrite your review. I’m not giving you something for free, but it’s just an acknowledgment of human to human connection. And not just like this faceless brand who made me wait an hour for my reservation. Right.

00:15:36:00 – 00:16:00:24

Melissa Hughes

You are so right. And when you think about what are the ingredients of a human to human connection, I mean the ingredients, it’s not tough. It’s being seen, being heard, being valued. Those three things make you feel connected to another person, whether it’s a guest in a restaurant or in a relationship or with your boss. Whatever be seen, be heard, be valued.

00:16:01:01 – 00:16:17:11

Melissa Hughes

And restaurants can do that. So simply by just what you said, but just that I’m Zach. Hey, Melissa, that personalization is worth gold when somebody is like, I just want to be seen, heard and valued, right? Yeah.

00:16:17:13 – 00:16:43:08

Zack Oates

Oh, that’s that’s so powerful. And I love reminding people we don’t serve customers in restaurants and we don’t even serve guests. Do you know who we serve, Melissa? We serve humans. And it doesn’t matter. Like you said, is it a steak dinner or is it a marriage? It’s like humans are humans. And yeah, yeah, the stakes are going to be different depending on whether it’s a restaurant or a marriage.

00:16:43:08 – 00:16:54:04

Zack Oates

But you still are dealing with humans. And I love how you said that. They want to feel seen, they want to feel heard. And what was the third one valued?

00:16:54:04 – 00:16:55:05

Melissa Hughes

They want to be valued.

00:16:55:10 – 00:17:21:16

Zack Oates

Yes. Oh, I love that, Melissa. I know this was such a unorthodox podcast, but I’ve loved this conversation. I think it is so powerful to remind our teams about the power of recovery and making sure that we are telling our story publicly, but we’re taking ownership privately, and that we’re making sure that they feel seen, heard and valued.

00:17:21:16 – 00:17:24:00

Zack Oates

I think that’s really powerful.

00:17:24:02 – 00:17:47:01

Melissa Hughes

Yeah, there’s another post on my website that talks about one restaurant that really turned a negative review around, and it went completely viral, and it was all kinds of press, and people were rallying, and it was because it was this nasty, nasty interview and it was all in the way. The owner responded. It was. And she didn’t give anything away.

00:17:47:03 – 00:17:53:19

Melissa Hughes

She didn’t give anything away. She responded sincerely and authentically, and that’s all people ask for.

00:17:53:21 – 00:18:09:21

Zack Oates

And if you want to read more of Melissa, use articles which I think you absolutely should. It’s Melissa Hughes, Dot rocks Melissa Hughes that rocks huge. Yes, that rocks Melissa. How else can people find and follow you?

00:18:09:23 – 00:18:29:03

Melissa Hughes

Well, I do a neuron nugget video every week because everybody wants to be a little bit smarter and know how the brain works. And so every week you can go to YouTube, you can subscribe to my YouTube channel and get a 3 to 8 minute video in there somewhere in there, and learn something fascinating about the human brain.

00:18:29:05 – 00:18:45:18

Melissa Hughes

I also send a neural nugget email out every Friday. And the one thing that I’m really terrible about is marketing. So I don’t try to sell you anything. I just want to tell you how the brain. So the neuron nugget, you can subscribe to that on my website at Melissa Hughes Dot rocks.

00:18:45:20 – 00:19:03:09

Zack Oates

Awesome. Well, I’m so excited that you came on. I’m so excited to have this perspective and to share this. But Melissa, for reminding us that a negative review is just a customer trying to save themselves from a saber tooth tiger. Today’s ovation goes to you. Thank you so much for joining us to give an ovation.

00:19:03:11 – 00:19:05:13

Melissa Hughes

Thank you Zach, it was a pleasure.

00:19:05:15 – 00:19:28:02

Zack Oates

Thanks for joining us today. If you liked this episode, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite place to listen. We’re all about feedback here. Again, this episode was sponsored by ovation, a two question, SMS based, actionable guest feedback platform built for multi-unit restaurants. If you’d like to learn how we can help you measure and create a better guest experience, visit us at ovation ABC.com.