CASE STUDY

Learn how Earthbar improved guest satisfaction, saved 400+ customers, and boosted online reviews by 0.4 stars in just a few months.

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Background & Problem

Earthbar is a California-based health and wellness brand offering premium smoothies, juices, and supplements, with 40+ locations.

Before Ovation, their guest feedback system felt inefficient and reactive. With one team member fielding emails and manually aggregating reviews weekly, Earthbar couldn’t get back to guests quickly enough to make a difference, or get a sense of what was a real issue and what was an anomaly.

“Ovation feels like having 100 secret shoppers a day, giving us actionable insights that help us maintain our high standards and deliver a consistent guest experience.”

John Laun, CMO, Earthbar

The Solution

By adopting Ovation, Earthbar empowered its store leaders with a streamlined, real-time feedback system. Guests could share their experiences instantly, and team members could resolve issues on the spot—often within 15 minutes.

The data Ovation provided enabled Earthbar to identify trends, improve operations, and even enhance the mobile order pickup experience by optimizing layouts, training, and signage.

The Impact

  • Improved Online Reviews: Earthbar saw a 0.4-point lift in average online ratings, with nearly all locations exceeding the critical 4.0 threshold.
  • Customer Retention: The team saved over 400 guests in just a few months, turning potential churn into repeat customers.
  • Operational Excellence: Increased visibility across 40 locations helped Earthbar uncover and address small but impactful issues, like smoother mobile order pickups.
  • Higher Feedback Volume: Earthbar now gathers 100 pieces of feedback daily, up from just 10 weekly, enabling data-driven decisions and better customer care.

“We’ve saved over 400 guests in a short time—people who came back, bought again, and had a five-star experience. We know Ovation is driving more revenue by helping us deliver better service and a better guest experience, which is ultimately what we’re here to do.”

John Laun, CMO, Earthbar

Q&A with John Laun, CMO, Earthbar

What was the state of guest feedback at Earthbar before Ovation? What led you to switch?

“So, prior to using Ovation, all of our guest feedback was handled by one amazing team member who was just responding to emails that came into info@EarthBar.com. We didn’t get a ton of emails—maybe a few per day on a good day—and who knows when they were writing in or how soon after their time at the store. It didn’t give us a lot of opportunity to real-time help that customer with the issue they were having.

With Ovation now, we’re really able to have our team members respond in real time when an issue pops up that same day, often within the same hour or 15-minute period, and interact with that store-level team member to find out what happened, what went wrong, how we improve that experience, and, also with great feedback, how to activate against great feedback from our team members who are going above and beyond.

The more you can do that in real time, number one, it takes a lot of pressure off of our support center team, helps our local store leaders really lead and manage their store-level teams better, and overall, the end game of everything we’re doing is to provide the best guest experience possible.”

What’s the biggest benefit you’ve seen from Ovation so far?

“The main benefit we’re seeing using Ovation at Earthbar is the volume of feedback we get from our guests every single day.

On a good week before, if we got ten pieces of feedback to our email address, that was a lot of feedback and data to work with. And two things happen: number one, we just don’t have a lot of feedback.

And number two, sometimes you overreact to a small sample size. So, if three people had an issue in a given week, all of a sudden, 30% of your feedback is about that issue, which could lead you to overreact to an issue that’s not that big or to miss a big issue because the sample size is so small.

Now, we’re getting 100 pieces of feedback every day across all of our stores. We’ve got 40 stores across the state of California. A lot of those stores—we didn’t even know if that feedback was coming from a specific location or store. So, we’re able to really get a higher volume of feedback, and that really benefits us across all of our stores across the state.”

How have you used the operational data you’ve gotten from Ovation?

“So, when it comes to data, we’ve really made an effort over the last two years to become a data-driven business, and the data we get from Ovation really helps advance that at the sentiment level and at the quality level at our stores—something that we didn’t have visibility into before at this level.

We’re able to spot trends as they pop up and react to things quickly, positive and negative. If we see something getting a ton of positive feedback, we amplify that, put marketing behind it, tell that story. And, clearly, if we see people having negative feedback about something, we can isolate that and see if it’s a training issue, if it’s a rollout issue, or even a specific store issue—maybe one team member has a different idea of a certain process that’s creating a negative guest experience.”

What would you say to someone who is on the fence about Ovation?

“The simplest question I ask somebody who’s on the fence about Ovation is: how badly do you want to know what your customers are thinking? If you think you’ve already got a great handle on what your customers are thinking, then you don’t need Ovation.

But if you wonder what your customer is thinking and you don’t have a solution for that yet, it’s the best solution we’ve found so far from a value standpoint. It gets you a ton of data, a ton of visibility, in a simple way.

If you know how to text, you can use Ovation. There’s not a steep learning curve. Any store, any store leader can do it, and it shows up for the guests in the way that they want to be interacted with. One thing we’ve noticed is that a guest who feels like they’re having a real-time text conversation is much more likely to get to the point of what they’re really looking for versus someone who’s going to spend 30 minutes writing an angry email. That real-time text feel of it—knowing and feeling you’re talking to a real person—really helps you realize, hey, there are real people behind the counter, too.

We’re all just trying to do the right thing.”

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