How Toppers Pizza Tripled Guest Feedback to Nearly 2,000 Surveys a Week

The Partnership

Toppers Pizza & Tattle

Toppers Pizza has been making pizza its own way since 1991, building a following in college towns from its Whitewater, Wisconsin base. What the brand lacked was a read on what guests actually thought.

"We had some initial conversations about not fully understanding what customers thought about us. That was the genesis," said Matt Martin, Vice President of Operations.

Surveys went out through a SurveyMonkey link. Everything else arrived through the website, which meant it was mostly a constant stream of guest complaints. Also, SurveyMonkey’s charts are not very actionable at a location level for operational improvements.

“The Tattle dashboard is definitely a huge plus. Seeing it visually versus SurveyMonkey…Tattle’s dashboards are definitely more actionable for store managers,” said Samantha Dembo, Senior Digital Marketing Manager.

• Launched: May 2025
• Locations: 66
• Integration: Proprietary tech stack

Guest Feedback

Seven Reviews a Week

Before Tattle, the typical Toppers location was working from almost nothing.

"I own a store in Lawrence, Kansas. It's a decent volume store, but it would get only seven reviews a week," Matt said. "And they would inherently be really negative. It was this kind of complaint stream."

Mystery shoppers filled the rest of the gap, one visit at a time.

"We've replaced them with Tattle, because we get so much more feedback for stores, versus one person going in and telling us about their experience," said Samantha.

Volume was the thing to fix, and Toppers worked it in steps with the Tattle team. With surveys going out via both RCS and reminder emails, their weekly survey submissions now average close to 2,000, with nearly 80% of them five-star.

Adoption

One System, One Standard

Rolling software into a franchise system is where most tools quietly die. But Tattle roll-out panned out differently.

"You know it’s a good product when people just buy in immediately," Matt said. "Overnight, 99% of people in our franchise system found value in the tool."

The rollout started with IT, since Toppers owns its tech stack and the data had to move correctly before anyone saw a dashboard. From there it went to the Franchise Advisory Council, who sees major decisions before the system does.

"Their reaction was very similar to ours: ‘Oh my god, yes, how soon can we do this?’" Matt said.

Tattle ran a systemwide training call for every general manager and franchisee. Then Toppers did the part that most brands skip.

"It's our tool. We believe in it. It's our guiding light. It's our voice of the customer," Matt said.

That belief is written down. Toppers built standards around specific Tattle metrics and embedded them in the franchise operations manual. The quarterly operations audit checks them like any other standard, and falling short has consequences.

"We've partnered with different companies over the years and introduced different things to the system, with varying degrees of implementation and fanfare," Matt said.

This one landed differently enough that Toppers made it official at its 2026 national convention, naming Tattle its Vendor of the Year.

Insights & Analysis

Down to the Sauce Cup

What franchisees found when they logged into Tattle was not a report card. It was a list of things they could do something about.

"Everything on there tells you what you need to know as an operator," Matt said. "You can go down the rabbit hole. Is it this particular sauce cup, or this particular pizza build?"

It settled an open question about nacho cheese. The team had a hunch, and heard the occasional complaint, but nothing conclusive.

"We saw that our nacho cheese was ranked really low. We kind of felt that way too, and Tattle data was the tipping point of saying, okay, we're moving, we're going to find a different nacho cheese," Matt said. "And we did, and we love it, and it gets high praise from customers now."

The same visibility runs through guest recovery. Franchisees can reply to a guest, comp them, and invite them back, and the franchisor can see which guests were taken care of and which were missed.

Results

Better Than They Thought

More feedback usually means more bad news. At Toppers it meant the opposite.

"One of the big takeaways is that we're actually operating better than we thought we were," Matt said. With seven surveys a week, a store only hears from the guests upset enough to say something. At nearly 2,000 a week across the system, the people who had a perfectly good experience are finally in the data too.

Which brings it back to the goal. For its 35th year, Toppers set out to earn 35,000 five-star reviews, a number that required both more surveys and better restaurants. By late summer the team had quietly given up on it.

"We were basically resigned that there was no possible way we were going to hit that," Matt said. "And now it looks like we're going to hit 40,000!"