How To Incentivize And Reward Your Restaurants Using Tattle

Behind every five-star restaurant is a team of great people. Let’s quickly look at how to utilize Tattle feedback data to inspire some friendly competition and ultimately empower your teams to create a more positive experience for guests.

1. Start collecting granular performance metrics

It’s impossible to roll out an incentivization or reward program across all your restaurant locations if you are unable to measure performance in the first place.

For this, we turn to the insights collected through Tattle’s granular, causation-based surveys. This allows restaurants to track many different guest satisfaction metrics, such as the following:

• Operational Categories (e.g. Food Quality, Accuracy, Speed of Service, etc.)
• Root-cause Factors (e.g. Temperature, Texture, Flavor, Spice, etc.)
• Daypart Performance
• Ordering Channel Performance
• Group Performance
• Guest Recovery Performance

The foundation of your rewards program must be built on guest feedback data. The Tattle platform allows GMs and their teams to see how their location fares in comparison with others (across a bunch of metrics) and how much more they need to improve customer experiences in order to win.

2. Decide the details

You need to figure out three things in this order: the time frame, the metric to measure, and the reward to distribute.

First, the time frame.

Once determined, most everything else falls into place. Typically, Tattle partners choose to do brand-wide competitions on a quarterly basis. This ensures competitions aren’t too frequent (where teams take it for granted/the prize is too small) or too spread out (where the prize is too distant/teams forget the competition).

Second, figure out the best metric to measure in the time-frame you have.

While Tattle provides a plethora of insights to choose from, it’s best to target one of the following:

• Operational category that has historically been weakest across the brand (Speed of service, hospitality, accuracy, etc.)
• A broader metric that involves as many people as possible (overall location satisfaction, guest recovery metrics, etc.)

Be strategic. Remember, the primary goal is to improve sentiment among customers – you don’t necessarily need to push teams to improve in areas that are already performing well.

Third, reward options. Here are some ideas we’ve seen for the winning team:

• Free lunch/dinner/breakfast
• Plaque/banner of recognition
• Team photo for brand-wide social media post
• Personal visit from the CEO/COO
• Team outing
• Gift cards

If possible, it’s worth setting aside a line item in the budget for this – the bigger the prize, the better the results. Additionally, you can also improve the effectiveness by increasing the customization of your prizes and leveraging your unique brand in it.

It’s critical that you get buy-in from general managers and franchisees on the rewards program. Brands often incentivize them separately with bonuses, travel, or additional marketing budget, because once they’re onboard, it’s game on.

Note: Some brands have opted to do multiple competitions across a variety of time frames and metrics. All of our suggestions are best practices, not rules – experiment and do whatever works best for your brand!

“Every month, MOD Pizza awards the best-performing location with a pizza paddle called the “Tattle Paddle”. The winner is recognized for their incredible performance and given the opportunity to share how they achieved their elevated OSAT score to the company via Zoom.” – Alex Beltrani, CEO of Tattle

3. Launch your program

This is the easy part. Give the competition a name and let everyone know!

Once you have a date for the competition to begin, you can keep tabs on the feedback metrics coming in from that date in Tattle.

It’s important to have reminders going out in all the internal communication channels, something that the marketing team can whip up in no time. And when a winner is selected, make sure the brand shouts it from the rooftops – for some individuals, public recognition is stronger than monetary rewards.

4. Enjoy higher satisfaction and friendly competition

Test and measure, rinse and repeat! Once you have a competition that really settles in with the location-level teams, you’re off to the races. A little extra competition goes a long way – and the customers will feel the positive impact from it.

This is just one of the many ways in which restaurant brands utilize Tattle to improve the guest experience.