The better a General Manager can understand the experience of their customers, the more effective they will be. And that’s not just in the long run, but in the day-to-day operations too.
Let’s jump into all the ways in which Tattle helps location-level leaders run better restaurants.
1. Breaking Down Operational Areas
When the customer experience (CX) remains a nebulous entity to General Managers, they have a difficult time deciding what needs improvement and where. Tattle dissects CX into digestible operational categories, promoting visibility and actionability – as many or as few as your brand requires.
Here are some of the most common ways restaurants divide it up: Pick-up, Hospitality, Attentiveness, Speed of Service, Food Quality, Accuracy, Online Ordering, Meal Packaging, Cleanliness, Delivery Driver, and more.
How does it help GMs?
Within Tattle, each category has its own unique customer experience rating. This enables GMs to quickly get a handle on their location’s guest sentiment and gain full visibility into each area of their operations.
Throughout the platform, these categories can be filtered in a variety of ways, helping GMs get macro and micro views of their store’s performance.
2. Finding Root-Cause Issues
While many GMs can save time and guesswork on operational categories alone, Tattle helps them to dig even deeper. Root-cause factors are the customizable elements that make up an operational category.
For example, the factors of the Food Quality category might be Temperature, Flavor, Spice, Texture, and more.
How does it help GMs?
Having such granular data enables GMs to precisely pinpoint areas of operational weakness.
For example, surveys might consistently indicate a problem with Speed of Service over a short time period. Upon inspection of the category, the GM would quickly discover multiple negative markers on the “Waiting In Line” factor. This is something they can take to their team and take care of quickly.
3. Evaluating Dayparts
Dealing with different teams across three or four shifts can add a lot of variability and nuance to restaurant operations. Daypart filtering is the ability to view the performance of operational categories and factors within each respective shift.
How does it help GMs?
This is an easy way to uncover which teams are performing well and which are performing poorly. Team incentives and rewards can be personalized around each shift’s scores, ultimately bringing about improvement across the board.
4. Evaluating Ordering Channels
Similar to daypart, channel filtering breaks down all operational categories and factors by the method of ordering. Some of the most common ordering channels are as follows: Dine-In, Take-Out, Curbside, Drive-Thru, and Delivery.
How does it help GMs?
Without channel filtering, it would be more difficult to act on operational categories with low scores. For example, it would be very useful for GMs if they knew that a drop in Food Quality was related specifically to their Drive-Thru process. An entirely different, yet significantly more accurate approach, would be taken to combat the problem.
5. Automating Improvement with Objectives
Tattle is able to leverage the large volume of feedback data collected by feeding it through our powerful Objectives algorithm. This algorithm identifies a location’s top areas for improvement and provides a roadmap for teams to accomplish the goal.
These objective are automatically generated every 30 days, according to the findings of the previous month’s feedback.
How does it help GMs?
Objectives is one of the most popular features with location-level leadership, with it even being deemed the “Playbook for GMs” by Tattle partners. Instead of chasing a new problem each day – ultimately spreading the team thin – your team gets to really sink into improving in one area and creating new habits, processes, and lasting change.
In fact, locations that hit their Objectives have an 84% probability of seeing satisfaction scores increase across the board, with higher revenue to follow in the next 60-90 days.
6. Strategizing Around Objectives
While each location has their own system for communication, Tattle Objectives provide a dedicated space for strategizing. Within each Objective, there is a goal (i.e. improve 4% points in Speed of Service), the top factors to be worked on, action items for the team to create and disseminate, along with a message center that enables direct messaging to the GM.
How does it help GMs?
Having a singular area where the team can ideate and plan how to tackle improvement opportunities is a tremendous time-saver – not only for GMs, but also for the staff at large.
7. Monitoring Incident Metrics
A guest who leaves a star rating of three or less is considered an incident. A large portion of the Tattle dashboard is built specifically for handling these dissatisfied customers, working to win them back in a timely manner. Here are a few statistics that can be measured with regard to guest recovery effectiveness:
Avg. Review Time: The amount of time it takes for an incident to be reviewed by a team member.
Avg. Reply Time: The amount of time it takes before a dissatisfied customer is responded to by a team member.
Reply Rate: The percentage of all incidents that are replied to.
Reply Satisfaction Rate: The percentage of incident replies that were resolved in a satisfactory manner.
How does it help GMs?
Each one of the statistics above represent a vital part of the guest win-back process – if they aren’t maintained, fewer customers will return and less revenue will be generated at that unit.
For example, if a GM sees that the Reply Rate is hovering around 70%, he can talk with his team and work with them to achieve a 90% Reply Rate or greater.
Or, as another example, if a disproportionately large number of people are making it through the recovery process, but are dissatisfied with the replies, then new messaging, rewards, and offers can be crafted to ensure maximum optimization.
This refining process applies to all statistics in this category, saving the GMs a great deal of time by isolating the weak points and recovering revenue.
Note: Not all restaurant brands have GMs and location-level teams managing incidents. While many do, sometimes regional or corporate teams manage guest recovery. It’s entirely up to the brand who handles this area.
8. Real-Time Incident Alerts
Whenever a new incident occurs, an email will automatically be sent out to all parties responsible for handling unhappy guests. These notifications are in real-time and spur-on quick responses, maximizing the chances at recovering the customer. Conditional logic can be used to escalate incidents to DMs or executives, as well.
How does it help GMs?
Regardless of where a GM is at any point in time, they can stay in the loop with these incident notifications. Many GMs like to personally respond to each complaint – this allows them to do so in a very speedy fashion.
9. Automating Guest Recovery
Every restaurant brand has a different approach to guest recovery. While some restaurants like to provide a personal touch with manual incident responses, others create branded templates that go out automatically and conditionally.
How does it help GMs?
More often than not, location-level teams have difficulty sending out responses to unhappy guests within the recommended 24-hour time frame. Have automations in place – with conditional logic (i.e. Send X email if survey is three stars, send Y email if a survey is one star, etc.) – allows GMs and their teams to be far more productive throughout the day.
10. Intercepting Negative Reviews
Tattle collects private feedback, whereas social media platforms (i.e. Yelp, Google, Facebook, etc.) host public reviews. Because Tattle sends a survey request email 90 minutes after a transaction, it effectively intercepts criticisms that may have otherwise been posted to Yelp or Google.
How does it help GMs?
Eliminating the headache of reduced social media scores is a major win in the eyes of GMs. In fact, over the past few years, our team tracked the Yelp scores of a variety of restaurant brands, finding that individual locations increase their star rating by 0.5% on average with the direct help of Tattle surveys. This half star increase is enough to draw in significantly more customers and revenue.
11. Improving Online Reputation
All restaurant brands have a dedicated Yelp and Google page for each individual location. These social review sites are key drivers of sales, with recent studies showing that every additional star correlates to 9% more revenue. When 5-star feedback arrives in Tattle dashboard, brands can elect to automatically send an email prompting the happy guest to leave a review on Yelp or Google,
How does it help GMs?
As Tattle’s private feedback system intercepts negative reviews from customers, Yelp and Google scores of individual locations will improve, resulting in more exposure online and greater sales volume. This process saves serious headaches for GMs that revolve around brand reputation.
12. Ending Yelp & Google Guesswork
The people who are most likely to leave a review of your restaurant on social media platforms are those who have had either a fantastic experience or an awful one. These extremes, paired with an unstructured review, make collecting actionable feedback on social platforms nearly impossible.
How does it help GMs?
First, GMs will collect a level-set of data through Tattle, without the chaotic extremes found on social media. In fact, the middle-of-the-road feedback is often where the best insights reside.
Second, operations no longer has to work to conjure up actionable insights on Yelp and Google where there often aren’t any, nor engage in time-consuming conversations. Everything operations needs to flourish is under one roof.
13. Accountability In Guest Interactions
The Incident Timeline is a way for location-level teams to keep track of unhappy customers in the guest recovery process. It shows when an incident was created, reviewed, and responded to, along with whether the guest was recovered or not.
How does it help GMs?
This feature injects a great deal of organization into the CX process. saving GMs time and energy by moving them away from cluttered email inboxes of customer replies. With Tattle, they get an intuitive, deep understanding of a guest’s complaint, where they are in the recovery journey, and what needs to be done next to have a shot at winning back their business.
14. Standardizing Brand Voice
Maintaining a unified voice across the brand is essential. With Tattle’s customizable, brandable email templates – for apologies, thank-yous, Yelp/Google review requests, problem escalation, etc. – there can be consistency across all correspondence.
How does it help GMs?
There are two ways. First, if the GMs choose to directly interact with guests themselves, they won’t have to worry about “Am I saying the right thing here?” or “Am I representing the brand well?” They just have to follow the pre-approved templates.
Second, if GMs designate guest communication to someone else at their location, they won’t have to fret about that individual gravitating away from the established voice.
15. Benchmarking Performance
Tattle has two types of benchmarking, depending on the permission level of the user. The first benchmark is a comparison between the performance of your brand and the entire restaurant industry (for executives). The second benchmark is comparison between the performance of an individual location and the entire brand (for DMs and GMs).
How does it help GMs?
Brand performance metrics are no longer buried in corporate powerpoints or in long email chains. The second a GM opens Tattle, they will see their performance vs. the entire brand. The simplicity and transparency of benchmarking is yet another motivator for GMs – whether that be in taking more decisive action to fix issues or in celebrating high scores with the team.
16. Getting A Rapid Debrief
Sometimes, GMs get so bogged down in the weeds of daily operations that they simply have no time to browse or tinker with different reports. That’s why Tattle created the go-to overview screen, which houses a quick rundown of the following: Customer Experience Rating breakdown, survey volume/trends, satisfaction/incident benchmarking, highest opportunity, dayparts, and channels.
How does it help GMs?
This page has everything a GM needs to know about their store. We’ve discovered that when GMs start their day, they like to hop over to Tattle in order to get a debrief on their performance. It’s fast, easy, and efficient.
17. Collecting Highly-Specific Insights
The operational categories cover about 90% of restaurant operations. The last few insights are gathered on the “Additional Questions” page at the end of the guest survey. These are typically a smattering of brand-specific questions, often relating to specific Limited-Time Offers (LTOs), loyalty programs, or demographic information. These customizable questions can be highly-strategic based on your food vertical and offerings.
How does it help GMs?
Questions like “Were you warmly greeted upon arrival?”, “How long did you wait for your meal?”, or “Did your server tell you about our specialty desserts?” are extremely actionable for GMs and can often lead to immediate improvements.
18. Utilizing The Photo Wall
On the final part of the Tattle survey, guests can opt to upload an image of their meal. When they submit it, and it arrives in the dashboard, it will appear on the Photo Wall. This area has the image, their Customer Experience Rating (CER), and a few details about visit.
How does it help GMs?
This is a quick and easy way for GMs to visually understand a customer’s experience. When there’s an issue with the order, they can take the image to the team in order to determine which process may have faltered and figure out a plan to fix it.
19. Unified Experience Management
Every one of the 18 above points is contained within a unified dashboard – insights, reports, objectives, guest recovery, automations, and much more.
How does it help GMs?
Because Tattle is turn-key and eliminates the need for secondary feedback sources, GMs can understand their entire guest experience without juggling multiple dashboards, logins, or complicated tech stacks.
20. Automatic Feedback Collection
Last, but not least, each one of the 19 points above are made possible by a battle-tested, causation-based survey that has been sent to tens of millions of customers across thousands of restaurants.
How does it help GMs?
Because the survey is so powerful, covering every part of restaurant operations and more, it relieves staff of any responsibility to solicit feedback from guests. The automatic integrations handle everything, leaving GMs and their teams free to execute, improve, and grow.
Conclusion
General Managers are crucial to the sustenance of brands and a core driver of expansion. Taking care of GMs must be of the highest priority for every restaurant brand. So, are your GMs empowered to succeed with high-quality feedback data?
If you want to schedule a time to meet with us and get a 1-on-1 tour of the Tattle platform, click here.
Want more?
Watch a rapid demo of the Tattle platform!
