How Wings & Rings Predicts Sales Growth With Sentiment Data

The Partnership

Wings & Rings

Since 1984, Wings and Rings has been perfecting the art of the sports restaurant experience with fresh wings, homemade sauces, and a deep-rooted commitment to community.

Based in Cincinnati, this beloved franchise now stretches across 11 U.S. states, serving up bold menu innovations and championing local initiatives that bring people together.

• Integrations: Olo, Punchh
• Locations: 85
• Survey Completion Rate: 92.8%

The Challenge

Measuring Guest Sentiment The Right Way

Wings and Rings had tried everything: Mystery shoppers, social media reviews, other CX platforms, but nothing gave them actionable insights from guest feedback.

"For mystery shops, it became easy for team members to figure out who the shoppers were, so the grades at the store level weren't accurate," said Bob Bafundo, COO at Wings and Rings. "Secondly, it came with significant cost. And that combination wore the whole brand down."

While social media reviews provided some feedback around LTOs, it didn't offer useful information for operational improvement at the restaurant level.

In addition, other CX platforms had lacked sufficient data points to help the team make informed decisions.

Tattle was the ultimate solution all along.

Having used Tattle at RAVE Restaurant Group (Pizza Inn & Pie Five), Bafundo knew it would be a great guest feedback tool for Wings and Rings' new "My Place Service" initiative.

The goal? Use Tattle to justify the initiative's ROI and make informed decisions that improve operations.

"We saw an immediate benefit just with how rich the Tattle data was," Bafundo said.

Solution #1

Turn Guest Feedback Into Sales Growth

Wings and Rings opened the floodgates of feedback with Tattle.

From the get go, some Wings and Rings stores were soon receiving over 30 Tattle survey submissions per month per store.

Each of these surveys contained 49+ operational data points, which paint a very clear picture of what's going on at each restaurant at all times.

"The significant data points gave us a lot more to work with, which led to building action plans and addressing issues immediately by store and by region," said Bafundo.

Then, a wonderful discovery was made.

During a quarterly Executive Business Review with Tattle – a white-glove analytics sessions led by Tattle's Head of Analytics, Alex Kuzmanoff – an incredible insight emerged.

"Alex showed an easy correlation between a store's Tattle scores and sales growth. Stores that are performing the best in Tattle are building sales, while those that aren't embracing feedback are not," said Bafundo.

That means by simply looking at a restaurant's CER (Customer Experience Rating) score in Tattle, one can anticipate whether its sales will grow, stagnate, or even fall.

Solution #2

Win Over Franchisees With Simplicity & Results

Actionable Insights = Serious Buy-In

Ironically, the franchisees didn't even know about the launch of Tattle at first, as the leadership team decided to try it out for digital orders only. But that changed really quickly.

"We were blown away by the volume and quality of the feedback data, that we had to come clean to the franchisees," said Bafundo. "We want to share the insights so they can take actions based on the feedback data. That sums up how excited we were."

"It was an easy buy-in for the franchisees – because of the ease-of-use," said Eric Sponseller, Sr. Operations Services Manager. "Typically franchisees are very vocal if something's difficult, but they've really loved how easy Tattle is.

"I don't have to explain the platform to a franchisee who's not tech-savvy. The dashboard is so intuitive that they can just log in and figure it out on their own," Sponseller continued.

Tattle makes life easy for franchisees.

Wings and Rings uses Tattle to handle review management, where each franchisee can monitor and reply to all online reviews.

The team also simplified their jobs and minimized repetitive tasks with features like AI response, which generates personalized AI replies to survey submissions or online reviews.

"It would have taken a shift manager 15 minutes to write a highly personalized response, but now it takes just 30 seconds," Sponseller said.

"Our franchisees have really embraced Tattle," stated Bafundo. "It's highly unusual that we get a comment from franchisees that something we offer to them is really great, but in this case we've had them come to us multiple times about that. That's pretty strong."

Solution #3

From Gut Feelings to Data-Backed Decisions

Tattle provides insights that can actually be used in the real world.

"We've seen our guest satisfaction scores steadily increase from 3.8 to 4.7 ever since Tattle drew our attention to guest feedback on different operational areas," said Sponseller.

Instead of basing decisions on anecdotes and gut hunches, the team was able to get authentic evidence.

For example, while franchisees were saying their new food packaging was leaking, Bafundo and the team were able to show using Tattle data that not only was such guest feedback rare, but also it was mostly due to items not properly placed in take-out bags.

There were many other examples, such as using feedback to show online ordering vendors where to improve in the ordering platform, or minimizing order accuracy issues with upgraded chit printers.

All-In-One Platform. All-In-One Partner.

Bafundo listed three things that have made Tattle an excellent partner: user-friendliness, volume/depth of data, and cost-effectiveness compared to other options in the industry.

In addition, the onboarding process was just as easy as the platform itself.

"Bandwidth is always a concern for a restaurant brand, but the Tattle team has been great at providing anything we needed," said Sponseller. "I haven't had to do any of the heavy lifting, and I can always count on our Customer Success Manager to promptly provide the support I need."