Success Story
How Dave’s Hot Chicken Leveraged Customer Feedback To Fuel Huge Growth
Through Tattle’s Customer Experience Improvement platform, Dave’s Hot Chicken has deployed an operation-focused feedback strategy that’s fueled 500% growth within a year.
“Sales is only a lagging indicator of success, not a leading indicator – unlike Tattle scores.”
Jim Bitticks
President & COO
Dave’s Hot Chicken
Our Partnership
DHC Wanted To Accurately Measure Everything. Down To The Topping.
After helping Blaze Pizza grow from two to 350+ locations as Chief Restaurant Officer, Jim Bitticks joined Dave’s Hot Chicken as President and Chief Operating Officer.
And Jim knew right away that this brand — similar to Blaze Pizza — needed to implement Tattle to accurately measure customer sentiments at each location and detect potential problems early as they embarked on a journey of rapid expansion.
Brand Overview
Integrations: Olo, Punchh, Revel
Locations: 145
Tattle partner since: 2019
The Objectives
Master Customer Experience & Scale To The Moon
Following his successful customer feedback management strategy at Blaze Pizza, Jim rolled out Tattle across all Dave’s Hot Chicken locations with the following goals in mind:
- Pinpointing issues with specific transactional data, so the leadership team can hold locations accountable and move quickly to resolve problems
- Address complaints early before negative reviews surface online
- Prompt positive reviews for greater discoverability on social platforms
- Automatically recover guests at scale
- Resolve customer issues in real-time when new locations open
Solution #1
Pinpoint Issues With Specific Transactional Data
1. Improving the order pickup process
Shortly after implementing Tattle, areas of improvement began to crop up.
On one such occasion, there were multiple negative survey responses from customers and delivery drivers about the confusing pickup process at DHC’s Pacific Beach location.
Soon after, the corporate office sent operations teams and franchise consultants to help them design the pickup signs, along with re-configuring the setup of the pickup location. This effectively stopped similar complaints from coming in.
Additionally, Dave’s Hot Chicken was able to preemptively roll out similar pickup setups at subsequent new locations to ensure a smooth pickup process from the get-go.
“What’s great about Tattle is that it gives the when, where, & what [of each customer’s experience].”
– Jim Bitticks
2. Locating problematic products
When the Irvine location received a few anecdotal complaints about extremely salty chicken, the team struggled to locate the faulty products after multiple tastings.
Given that the five online reviews about this issue provided little to no context, the team resorted to Tattle and saw not only a higher feedback volume regarding this issue, but also more specific information to help them locate the product.
The team was finally able to locate the faulty bag of products and intercepted another bag with issues at a new location before it reached the hands (or mouths!) of any customers.
Solution #2
Use Data To Hold Locations & Teams Accountable
Equipped with unbiased metrics and data, Jim found it much easier for the leadership team to benchmark locations, attribute problems, and set goals for each franchisee.
“What’s great about Tattle is that it allows restaurant leadership to leverage data in support of their teams,” Jim said. “They [the teams] will become very responsible for their Tattle scores.”
With the heatmap feature in Tattle, operations managers can see the performance and key metric changes of each location, as well as their top improvement opportunities.
It’s also easier than ever to see how engaged the staff are at each location by looking at incident dashboard and resolution timeline. This helps management teams understand if each issue is addressed based on best practices and whether all complaints are taken care of as expected.
Solution #3
Intercept Negative Reviews Before They Surface Online
Studies show that it can take up to 40 positive reviews to undo the damage of a single bad review. It’s imperative for brands to prevent negative reviews online as much as possible.
“When customers post about us online, they’ll only post about good things because we have already addressed all the negative things,” Jim said of Tattle’s Incident Dashboard.
When brands solicit feedback through Tattle’s feedback surveys, your teams are the first to know that an issue has occurred and can address it in real time. Dave’s Hot Chicken made it a priority to respond to all customer feedback in a timely and proper manner.
For brands lacking manpower, Tattle can automatically address negative reviews with pre-set conditional email responses. These customizable emails range from an apology to a free menu item or anything in between.
The Results
%
Increase in Speed of Service
%
Increase In Food Quality
%
Increase In Online Ordering Experience
Dave’s Hot Chicken consistently sees tens of thousands of reviews coming through Tattle on a weekly basis and is able to accurately pinpoint the highest-impact growth opportunities at a location level.
Over the past two years, Dave’s Hot Chicken has seen a consistent increase in Customer Experience Rating (CER) scores of over 20%, with a lift across all operational categories as seen below:
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