Background:
Back in 2005 in a tiny 200 ft. sq. basement stall in the Golden Shopping Mall in Flushing, NY, this family owned and operated team Xi’an launched with the steadfast goal of promoting food from the Chinese city of Xi’an. Now, 11 years and 9 locations later, XFF spans across Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn seeing a variety of tremendous praise and press by famous chefs and television personalities in Anthony Bourdain, Bobby Flay, and Andrew Zimmern.
Today, Xi’an touts 30 separate dishes, featuring hand ripped noodles, cold noodles, burgers, soups, cold dishes, and a variety of other specialities with levels of spiciness, and has even been heralded as an exemplary ambassador of its hometown by China itself.
In popularizing many of its native dishes, along with adhering to its roots as an American-born business, XFF’s rapid growth and successes have been an ongoing testament to the team’s commitment to offering a ‘taste of home to their ethnic community’ and clinging strongly to its ethos of purity to the Xi’an culture.
XFF and Tattle Strategy:
Across XFF’s 9 locations and the rest of Manhattan’s 15,000 restaurants, minimum wage has increased which introduced added labor costs into NYC restaurant budgets by 12-20%, disrupting economics across the board.
In an effort to refocus efforts toward ongoing internal staff performance, XFF launched with Tattle to more clearly assess the performance of their staff and manage the experience of their customers. In XFF’s locations and its casual dining spot, Biang!, they have transitioned towards a minimum wage increase, revenue sharing among staff, and increased menu pricing by 20% to offset these changes. Coupled with this shift, XFF needed Tattle to complete its transition for the following reasons:
- To collect invaluable onsite feedback from customers
- To collect ratings and scores from customers that tie back to individual front of house servers
- To monitor more closely the sentiment of customers in light of moving towards no tipping
- To provide a more meaningful and direct feedback outlet in order to respond to customers and retain their relationship beyond the walls of their locations
With only 1% of Yelp users writing reviews, Xi’an has quickly discovered the underserved customer base who has been desperately seeking to engage with Xi’an marketing and operations teams for more constructive communication.
Welcome to Tattle, XFF!
