Craftworks: Power of Survey
Outback Steakhouse: Changing Labor
February 3, 2017
CRAFTWORKS: POWER OF SURVEYS
Company Profile
CraftWorks Restaurants & Breweries, Inc. is the largest craft brewery restaurant operator in the country with nearly 200 franchised and company-owned restaurants primarily operating under the Old Chicago Pizza & Taproom, Gordon Biersch Brewery Restaurants and Rock Bottom Restaurants & Breweries brands.
Challenges
A restaurant exists to provide excellent food and service to its consumers. But how can management tell if they are executing well without rapid feedback from its customers? For almost all restaurants, it is impossible to get feedback from any reasonable sample of restaurant customers, with most brands collecting feedback from than 1 percent of visiting guests. In a tough competitive environment, where gaps in customer service can be punished by rapid drops in guest traffic, Craftworks recognized that they needed more guest insights and sought a solution that would deliver greater insights for their business.
Before Presto, it seemed like an impossible task to increase the number of surveys we were receiving. We tried everything from incentivizing Yelp reviews to customized guest comment cards. Nothing worked.
Solutions
Currently there are a few options commonly used when it comes to collecting guest feedback:
- Paper receipt codes, which have a less than 1% completion rate.
- Mystery shopping, which is proven often to be unreliable and inaccurate due to the lack of authenticity of mystery shoppers and low sample set of data. Mystery shopper’s comments can be subjective or inconsistent, and mystery shopper could be identified by servers and receive an experience that is less than authentic. In addition, mystery shopping is expensive for a very limited set of data.
- Paper comment cards, which involve an inefficient and labor-intensive process that make it hard to aggregate the data due to the lack of automation.
- Tabletop Presto system, automatically prompts for guest feedback after a payment is made.
Why The Presto System?
Eschewing traditional methods for collecting feedback, Rock Bottom selected Presto System because of its integration of guest surveys with pay-at-table technology, creating a seamless process for guest input. Over 60% of guests who pay via the Presto system end up filling out the survey, at no cost, without any incentive needed. Compared to outdated methods such as paper receipts, mystery shopping and paper comment cards, Presto Surveys combine traditional feedback methods with restaurant technology to bring in high completion rates.
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Benefits
Insights from Customized Guest Surveys & Actionable Data
Upon payment through the Presto terminal, guests fill out customized surveys, which yield a higher volume of feedback and provide granular transaction data as well as integrated guest satisfaction results. Before the integration of the Presto terminal, Craftworks was receiving less than a 1 percent completion rate on surveys. After the Presto tablet was deployed in the restaurant, Craftworks started receiving a 60 percent completion rate.
Traditional survey methods simply do not cut it for today’s restaurant operator, who demand better quantity and quality from their guest feedback.
Saved Labor Hours
Since servers are one of the most important assets in delivering a memorable dining experience, identifying and retaining the best servers are vital to maintaining a consistent competitive advantage. Craftworks was able to utilize the massive increase in guest feedback data to accurately identify the best staff members and provide operators with the ability to make staffing decisions based on consistent and accurate data. The best staff are rewarded with the best shifts, larger table sections, and both the guest and the business win. In the end, Rock Bottom was able to save 27 labor hours a week and ultimately aims to save 36 labor hours a week.
With tabletop technology, our team here at Craftworks has been able to receive valuable feedback from guests compared to traditional methods. We have been able to take advantage of this surplus of feedback to better employee benefits, revamp employee-performance based scheduling and make operational improvements to deliver more progressive and more refined experiences for staff.
Results
Rock Bottom Long Beach was successful in operationalizing the Presto System and accomplished their ultimate goal of obtaining meaningful and tangible business insights through guests surveys. Leveraging the Presto terminal to receive more guest surveys, Craftworks gained valuable insights on server performances through guest satisfaction scores. Craftworks operators were able to reward high performing servers with the best shifts, as well as retrain poor performing servers.