CASE STUDY: Continuous Actions Process

Every restaurant operator knows that it can sometimes take months to fine-tune and perfect changes to processes, pricing and menus. And despite the best efforts of the culinary and operations teams, it can be hard to know what’s landing well with customers.

“The key is visibility into what customers really think. That’s why we developed Yumpingo.” – George Wetz, BBI Survey Studio.

With Black Box Intelligence you can test improvements in a handful of locations before you commit to a full rollout across all of your venues. This ensures every change you make is working hard to win new customers, grow satisfaction and drive up profits.

Establishing a Control Group

For one of our casual-dining customers, BBI Survey Studio was implemented in 26 venues of an 85 venue restaurant group and tested for 9 months. The trial used POS-connected BBI Devices to collect customer feedback.

The trial gave us a unique opportunity to use BBI Survey Studio to gather data and make targeted changes in a set of test sites against a control group.  The hospitality brand started to see the impact of decisions based on BBI’s experience management insights.

• The rate of growth in BBI Survey Studio-enabled restaurants outperformed the rest of the estate by 12% at the end of the period.
• Sites using BBI Survey Studio experienced 20% extra sales per location per month by the end of the trail, compared with sites that didn’t use BBI Survey Studio.
• The sales increase accounted for a 70x Return On Investment (ROI) in BBI’s services.
• 245,000 reviews were collected.
• The BBI Survey Studio sites saw a 6 point NPS increase and a 14% reduction in unhappy guests.

These changes primarily reflect the efforts of area and in-venue teams as they implemented a process of continuous improvements to customer experiences in their respective venues.

It’s worth noting that there were no major decisions made that only affected the test group. All major changes over the trial period, like menus and pricing updates were implemented across the whole brand estate.

Changes That Deliver

From adjusting cooking methods, ingredients, portion sizes on individual dishes, or homing in on specific service steps such as improving staff knowledge about the menu, the changes that were made as a result of guest sentiment insights delivered a significant, positive impact on the customer experience.

In one instance the CEO, through using BBI Survey Studio, learnt that the scores in one venue were low for dishes from the grill. The cause was identified as a specific piece of kitchen equipment. After fixing it he was able to watch, in real-time, as the guest satisfaction results went up.

George Wetz, who built BBI Survey Studio said, “Our partner already has a strong brand with consistently high feedback scores. But they’ve been able to use Survey Studio to turbo-charge that. By striving to better understand what their customers want and being willing to listen and act on that knowledge, they are reaping the rewards, with higher recommendation and return rates driving up sales.”

Learning & Development Strategies

Bringing staff along on this journey of improvement has been vital to achieving those successes. Jess Orton, Head of Customer Success adds, “Front and back of house teams have been empowered to make changes they can put into action along the whole customer interaction journey. And critically for their buy-in, they can see the positive impact that’s having.”

“They can own and celebrate the positives while identifying and contributing to areas for improvement, so they are embracing and supporting the changes.”

George Wetz continues; “What counts in hospitality is the guest experience. If guests love what you’re offering, then they return and recommend your brand more frequently, creating a virtuous circle of loyalty and ultimately profitability.”

“The key is visibility over what customers really think. That’s why we developed BBI Survey Studio, to put a broad and deep amount of data and product-level insights from guest feedback in front of restaurant operators, so they can do exactly that. And we break down those data insights into user-friendly, easy-to-digest actions that the teams on the ground can implement.”

Continuous Action Process (CAP)

Clients that action our objectives increase NPS by 13 points on average experience significant sales growth.