The Partnership
Bonchon & Tattle
Bonchon was founded in Busan, South Korea in 2002 by Jinduk Seo. The name means “my hometown.” Bonchon is known for its hand-battered, double-fried Korean fried chicken and its own sauces. The brand opened its first U.S. store in Manhattan in 2010 and is now the leading Korean fried chicken brand in the country, with 150+ U.S. locations and 498+ worldwide.
- Integrations: Olo, Aloha, Fishbowl
- Locations: 150+ in the U.S.
- Transaction Count Growth: 71%
The Challenge
One Score Can’t Explain a Whole Store
Most restaurant brands measure guest experience with a single overall score. It's simple to track, but it doesn't tell you much. A dip in that number could mean packaging fell apart on the drive home, the kitchen was short-staffed, or the dining room wasn't clean, and each of those needs a completely different fix. Without a way to break the score apart, operators are left guessing at what to change.
For a brand like Bonchon, which serves guests through both a dining room and a large, growing off-premise business, that gap is even bigger. A single rating can't separate a dine-in problem from a takeout problem, let alone tell you whether the room, the food, or the packaging is behind it.
Customer Experience Rating, or CER, is Bonchon's overall guest score and its number-one driver. But turning that score into something operators could act on meant going further: breaking it down by daypart, channel, and item, with enough honest feedback volume to trust what the data was actually saying. Tattle gave Bonchon the granularity to see not just that something was wrong, but exactly what and where.
"CER is the number one driver for us."
Ashley HelkennSr. Director of L&D and Ops Services, Bonchon
The Solution
Honest Feedback Before It Ever Reaches Google
Bonchon made a deliberate choice not to offer rewards for filling out its Tattle surveys and still gets a high volume of responses at a 94.5% survey completion rate. Without a prize on the table, guests seem to respond for a different reason: they care about the brand, or they simply want their time respected.
That volume of honest, private feedback also means Bonchon often hears about a problem before it ever becomes a public review. When shift-change execution was a recurring problem, the team could hand operators exactly what guests were saying in real time.
"We get a lot of people who say this place is special and this is honest feedback, or my time has value and I want you to respect it. We got real value without incentivization, so we have a good baseline."
Ashley HelkennSr. Director of L&D and Ops Services, Bonchon
The Cleanliness Discovery
One of the clearest things Tattle has shown Bonchon is how much cleanliness matters. Food quality is still the top reason guests come back, but the data revealed something the team didn't expect: cleanliness mattered more than hospitality for dine-in guests.
Because cleanliness is something operators can see and check, the finding turned into action fast. Bonchon built it into line checks, so operators inspect cleanliness store by store the same way they'd check food temperature or ticket times.
"Stores with cleaner environments have higher growth and profitability, and we see that same pattern across markets. We used to think hospitality came first, but not at the expense of the basics."
Ashley HelkennSr. Director of L&D and Ops Services, Bonchon
Putting the Data to Work Every Day
CER is Bonchon's top driver, but the team also looks at daypart, channel, and item-level feedback to find the real cause behind a score. If a store's dashboard turns red in a category, the team can check whether the problem is takeout, hospitality, or packaging instead of guessing.
Item-level feedback has changed how Bonchon approaches menu R&D. Comparing scores for the same dish between dine-in and takeout showed a real gap in the off-premise experience. With an estimated 60% of guests eating off-premise, that data now shapes packaging, food design, and menu decisions directly instead of treating takeout as an afterthought.
Bonchon also uses seasonal patterns to stay ahead of problems. Knowing that end-of-day performance always dips in the summer, the team now reminds stores around the seasonal time change to adjust heat-lamp temperature and dining-room conditions. That one adjustment has helped late-night sales.
The Results
From Insight to Growth
Bonchon's Tattle data now shows up in real numbers: a 71% increase in transaction count, a 73% drop in the time it takes to review an incident, and a 28% increase in order accuracy. Each one traces back to a specific decision the data made possible: cleanliness standards from the hospitality discovery, packaging fixes from dine-in versus takeout scores, and faster incident response from a high volume of honest guest feedback.
That trustworthy baseline is what lets Bonchon act on its data store by store and market by market.
Key Benefits With Tattle
- Grew transaction count 71%, cut incident review time 73%, and improved order accuracy 28%
- Gets high survey volume without offering rewards, which keeps feedback honest
- Hears about problems privately before they turn into public reviews
- Found that cleanliness matters more than hospitality for dine-in guests and built it into store line checks
- Combines CER, daypart, channel, and item-level data to find the real cause of a problem instead of guessing
- Uses dine-in versus takeout scores to guide packaging, food design, and menu decisions
- Splits packaging feedback into kitchen and front-of-house categories inside the AI Coach
- Built a custom “value” metric with Tattle's team to separate price from overall satisfaction
