Insights & Updates
Latest from Tattle
Discover trends, tips, and insights to elevate your restaurant operations.
Discover trends, tips, and insights to elevate your restaurant operations.
Tattle Team
In a recent webinar, we sat down with operators from Wings and Rings and Cotton Patch Cafe to discuss their game-changing experience with Tattle’s AI Coaches. Here’s what they shared about turning guest feedback into frontline action and achieving record-breaking satisfaction improvements in just 90 days.
Colby Baird (Cotton Patch Cafe): Our philosophy centers on the fact that in small communities, every guest matters. We create quality food from scratch and ensure every guest leaves with a smile. The AI Coach aligns perfectly with this because it helps us maintain that excellent experience consistently across all locations.
Eric Sponseller (Wings and Rings): We position ourselves as an elevated sports bar focused on connection with a chef-driven menu. AI coaching supports this by ensuring our elevated standards are maintained through data-driven insights rather than guesswork.
The AI Coach helps both brands stay true to their core values by providing objective, consistent analysis of guest experiences—something that’s crucial when you’re committed to making every interaction count.
Colby: We had one person analyzing feedback for our entire brand, which created a bottleneck. Our team member Shelby was spending hours going into every dashboard for each location to look at data and analytics. It was a painful, time-consuming process that put enormous pressure on our team.
Eric: Our managers were spending a significant portion of their day analyzing data instead of focusing on operations. We needed something that would give franchisees and store managers quick and easy access to actionable insights.
Bob Bafundo (Wings and Rings COO): Think of it as having an analyst on your team that does all the work for you—and one that’s always 100% objective. The traditional challenge in restaurants is that analysis often gets procrastinated because operators are constantly putting out fires.
The AI Coach transformed what used to be hours of manual work into a streamlined, automated process that delivers consistent insights without the human resource strain.
Colby: We used our ‘Path of Excellence’ materials, all brand standards, food identifiers and checkpoints, temperature logs, and existing training materials like charts. Everything we already had documented became the foundation for Coach Patchy.
Eric: We fed Wing Man our position manuals, brand standards—basically anything the team already knew that had been written down and documented.
Bob: We chose franchisees who were leaders in the community for our initial rollout. When that group stood up and said this made their lives easier, the rest of the franchise community listened quickly. The key was letting them see how the system works and that they had to do virtually no work to get analysis and action items.
Colby: One breakthrough came from chicken complaints. Initially, we thought it was a food quality issue with the chicken itself. But the AI Coach’s analysis revealed the real problem was missing gravy—an execution issue, not a product issue. This insight allowed us to work with our Learning and Development team to create targeted training that actually addressed the root cause.
Bob: We had invested in new carryout packaging that looked great—the design and branding made us proud. But the AI Coach objectively identified that while the branding was beautiful, the functionality wasn’t working for our off-premise sales. Because the AI Coach has no subjective interpretation, it caught something we might have overlooked due to our emotional investment in the new design.
Eric: The AI Coach provided validation for things we kind of felt needed to be looked at but gave us the concrete data to act on them confidently.
These examples highlight how AI coaching goes beyond surface-level feedback to identify systemic issues that human analysis might miss or rationalize away.
Bob: There’s now more of a partnership between managers and Tattle. Managers used to hate mystery shoppers because of the ‘gotcha’ mentality. Now they’re excited to dig in and see where they can improve. The name ‘AI Coach’ makes sense—instead of calling you out, it provides both data and coaching.
Colby: Rather than reacting defensively to complaints in the moment, managers now look at trends and what the data actually tells them. It helps bridge past that initial defensive reaction to think about how we coach back.
Eric: It’s simple and saves time for GMs and for me. The system delivers insights through multiple channels—email and dashboard—making it accessible however they prefer to consume information.
Colby: This is real information, pulling exactly what your guests are giving you. It’s simplistic, saves hours of time, and uses real information that matches up with your own operations—it’s all up to date.
Eric: It’s store-specific. Each store gets different focus areas and unique action items. Just try it out. It’s not a heavy lift on our end, you get quick and immediate results, and you immediately have items to act on.
Bob: Ask yourself: Is analysis getting done consistently, or are we just putting out fires instead of improving over the long run? Traditionally, deep analysis only happens in outlier stores. But what if your best stores could get even better? Sometimes the easiest way to move the entire chain is to improve your top-performing locations.
