speaker-1 (00:11.192)
Good afternoon and welcome to our webinar, Your Restaurant’s Not Perfect and Why That’s a Good Thing, Harnessing the Hidden Value of Guest Recovery. I’m Andi DeTweiler, editor of Pizza Marketplace and QSR Web. And I’m here today with Zach Oates, founder and CEO of Ovation, and Greg Majewski, founder and CEO of Craveworthy Brands. We’re going to be talking about all things guest feedback and how you can cash in on guest recovery. And with that, I’ll turn it over to Zach and Greg.

Thanks so much and appreciate being a part of this and Greg always fun to chat with you whether or not it’s recorded. How you doing today?

I’m great, like always. And it’s amazing that I always get to do stuff like this with a friend, which is even better. When your friends outside of work and you get to work with people and you believe in each other’s companies, great things tend to happen. And we have had some amazing times and amazing success together in a short amount of time. So excited to go through this with you and see why they should be harnessing the hidden value of

Yeah, Amen!

speaker-1 (01:18.542)
guest recovery. Hey, I actually read what I’m talking about.

Which, which for us, you know, when we do panels, Greg, normally we get up there and wing it. And this time it’s like, got to, we got a deck, we got an agenda. we’re to start with the value of retention. We’re to go over three pillars of recovery and then get some Q and a. So if you have questions, feel free to drop them in the chats or in the Q and a channel. And, we’ll, we’ll get to those by the end. real quick for those who are unfamiliar with ovation, we are a guest experience management platform.

for restaurants, primarily focused on multi-unit restaurants. I grew up in the hospitality industry and realized that everything that we do in this industry is to create a great guest experience. But the ways to measure that and operationalize that were really lacking. So I created Ovation and it starts with frictionless guest feedback where we’re able to connect with the guest in real time, make it really simple for that guest to chat with you. Then it goes into the one-to-one guest engagement.

where you’re able to bring those guests back. You’re able to activate the happy guests. And then it goes into the operational excellence where we take all that data. We make it easy for you to take, to take action on and to track, to make sure that the things that are happening are actually happening through frictionless feedback with your guests. So it’s a, it’s an operational, excellence platform really focused on, on restaurants who want to improve their brand. Now,

Craveworthy, if you’re not familiar with Craveworthy, I don’t know where you’ve been living, but welcome to the internet because Craveworthy is just everywhere. Look at all these brands, Greg. Does it get exhausting?

speaker-1 (03:06.804)
It never gets exhausting. love what I do. And we set a goal and a huge goal and we’re going to accomplish it. So there’s going to be more on here at one point.

In fact, in fact, this slide was even updated just recently, a rock in my big chicken hat. We’ve, I’ve been a huge fan of big chicken. We’re going to talk a little bit about big chicken later on. but it’s been amazing to work with them and to, you know, over the last couple of years and see the growth and see what they’re doing and incredible that they’re joining the crave worthy family. And so, that’s, that is big news.

How was that received by the way?

In the company, it was exciting and people were humming about it. Outside, you took what Craverly has had, which we’ve been all over in our media presence, it’s huge. And then you take the power of what Big Chicken was doing and combining the two, the two weeks after we made the announcement, I’ve never seen as much social love as we got between Josh and myself, sort of talking about what we were doing as this one. I mean, it blew up.

2000, 2000, 3000 likes on post. had people shredding, know, had Shaq talk about us on TV. I mean, it was unreal the amount of goodwill that this sort of generated. was game changing for both companies.

speaker-2 (04:34.56)
And it’s just amazing because you both have that mentality of guest first, right? Like how do we make sure that the guest feels the love? How do we make sure that the guest knows that they’re cared about? And it’s like good food, good service. That’s good, but good is not good enough anymore.

So, I mean, and our philosophy is that, you know, we’re in the restaurant business. We’re going to mess up a customer’s order. It’s going to happen. It’s the most, out of any industry out there, the restaurant industry makes more mistakes than anything else. Because you’re looking at the fact that you’re using a lower labor market. You’re using usually people that are on their first jobs and just getting started. They get overwhelmed.

You get all the orders at a peak time and you forget stupid things like sauces in a bag. So we know how important it is and how much we have to win back those mistakes that we’re going to make just because it is the way the industry works. This industry, you are never going to be perfect. And there’s pizza companies out there. And one of my favorite is Marco’s pizza that, you know, is out there that is growing and booming and everything else, but you’re going to screw up a pizza every once in a while.

You know, it’s going to happen. How do you win that guest back and make it better? You find a system and a partner like ovation to do so.

And that’s one of the things that we’ve seen time and time again, is that this industry is different than other industries. And the fact that if you look at the guests that return within a year, and we’ve talked about this a lot, Greg, but for anyone here, I don’t know if the chat is active, but what would you guess if the chat’s active and you want to throw in a guess here? The percentage of guests who return within one year to your business,

speaker-2 (06:27.466)
It was shocking. I was thinking, you know, coming from, I grew up in restaurants, went into e-commerce. so looking at e-comm, it’s like, okay, you’ve got a 50, 60 % retention rate in the restaurant industry. It’s 30%. But the good news is, and this is something I know that you’ve seen in your career, Greg, is that if you increase the customer retention, profits follow. In fact, just a 5 % increase in customer retention

will yield a 25 to 95 % increase in profits. And this is just, it’s so powerful, but like we were talking about, you could have good food, good service, but good isn’t good enough. In fact, I was eating at a restaurant, of Wolfgang Puck’s restaurants with a guy that was president of a brand over a thousand locations. We sat down and I said,

We’re talking about feedback. And I said, yeah, like for example, the croissant isn’t very good. He goes, I know I had it last week. It’s pretty dry. said, Server comes up, not 30 seconds later. Now keep in mind, he’s president of over a thousand locations. I have a restaurant guest feedback company. The server comes up and says, how was everything? And what do we say?

you

speaker-1 (07:47.425)
Bye.

It was fine. Right. And it is someone once said, someone saying that your food is fine is like that. That is the worst F word. That is like the worst four letter F word in the restaurant industry.

Worst answer in the world.

speaker-1 (08:04.499)
Like you never ever tell your date that they look fine.

Yeah.

You just you can’t do it and you went on a thousand first dates. How many times did you screw up and tell them they looked fine?

about 999 of them, right. And that’s the thing nowadays is there’s, there’s so much complexity, but what does that mean? And what that means is that a lot of people turn to online reviews. In fact, people are three times more likely to leave a negative review than a positive one. And this is something I know that you and I have talked about a lot, Greg is like this. It’s this vending machine principle of if you put a dollar in a vending machine.

and your chocolate bar doesn’t come out, even though it’s a dollar, you just start going Hulk on that vending machine. And that’s the problem is like, if people don’t get what they pay for, they look to other avenues. I love this. This is one of my favorite placards. It says, come in and try the worst coffee one woman on TripAdvisor had in her life. Right.

speaker-1 (09:07.054)
would actually go in that one. Like if I saw that sign, I would have to go and try it.

I have a customer, actually put up their negative reviews on their wall. They have like posters of their negative reviews. And part of it is actually to set the expectation because one of them said, pizza is burnt. Well, this is like a Neapolitan style pizza place where there’s gonna be a little bit of char on the pizza. It’s made in a wood oven pizza, wood oven, you know, it’s wood oven pizza. And so yeah, there’s gonna be a little bit of charring on there.

They kind of poke fun at that. think that’s great. Now, you said something earlier though, that basically alluded to this concept that it’s not about perfection, but it’s about connection because we will always make a mistake in the restaurant industry, but it’s how we handle it, right? In fact, there’s something called the service recovery paradox, where a guest who has a service failure and then they have proper service recovery. Can you guys see my mouse here?

I don’t know if you guys can see that, anyway. Okay. Well, anyway, they have service. there. Proper service recovery. They are more likely to become loyal than if you never had a service failure in the first place. And what’s interesting speaking about dating, this isn’t just true for restaurants. This is true for relationships. They’ve done this study at the Gottman Institute about couples, about marriages, even about parents and children.

where it’s not about being perfect. It’s about making sure that you have that human connection with them. And I don’t know, have you seen that in any experiences like this in your career?

speaker-1 (10:53.646)
true when you make a mistake and you own up to it and you make it a win, you take something that was a loss and turn it into a win. And that’s this opportunity. You create a loyalty with that customer again and again, because one, they know you care. So we have a running joke right now. it’s because I have done this so many times is that when we get a bad review or something, I will personally go and deliver the makeup order to the customer.

and apologize and all that. And it’s to show that we care and that, hey, yes, we are going to buy your office lunch and all that. But then I’m the one that delivers the lunch. And it’s an opportunity for us to win that customer back. Now, obviously, most people on my roles don’t have that kind of time to do so. But I feel it’s important to set a tone with my team that winning a customer back is the most important thing that we can do because it’s a cheaper form of advertising.

than actually advertising to my customers and getting new customers. I can’t afford to lose the people that have been coming in and the people that tend to complain are going to complain, but want to be won over. They’re not doing it just to be vindictive. Obviously you have some of those and it takes some, it hurts in your heart when you first start into this business that every, Oh my God, I can’t believe they didn’t like my my pasta, you know, this shit.

They said it was horrible. What do they know? Well, not everyone’s going to like everything that you put on your menu. It’s how you take care of them after the fact. It’s how you don’t insult them. You apologize. You give them an opportunity to win something else. It’s hospitality at its finest. But that part of the business has slipped. We think we can get a new customer so easily that we don’t want to be this hospital selves to make something right. So the cost.

to recover someone is way cheaper than the cost to lose that customer or gain a new customer. So you might as well just make it right.

speaker-2 (12:52.942)
I mean, they’re already there. Like you’ve done 99 % of it. It’s just this last little piece. In fact, I want to tell a quick story because I know that there may be some brands who are like, there’s no way that we can scale this kind of hospitality. Well, let me tell you about Post Cereal. have a Honeycomb is one of my favorite cereals. They changed the recipe a few years back. I was furious because the new stuff tasted like cardboard. I messaged them on Facebook.

gave a diatribe of like how they are, I feel like they’re like ruining, messing with my childhood memories, you know? And a few months later, they wrote me back on Facebook and they said, hey, can I have your address? And I was like, kind of creepy, but let’s see where this goes. I give them my address and they send me this box of honeycomb and it said it’s back. And then they sent me an apology letter that was printed out, but it still was an apology letter.

saying we’re sorry, our bad. And I thought that was so powerful. And now I go all around the country talking about Honeycomb because they recovered me as a guest, as a customer. And I am so much more loyal to them now just because of this one little thing they did. And it may have seemed unreasonable, unreasonable hospitality is kind of like what we need to do nowadays.

As we look at our 3 pillars of guest recovery, the first is you need to ask. Actually take time to ask. Actually make sure that they feel like you understand their perspective. And don’t do it in a way that makes a lot of work for that guest. If you right now have a long-form survey that you’re starting with and you’re saying, Hey, Greg, could you answer 20 questions about your experience today with us? That’s the wrong way to do it.

the guest doesn’t want to do that. They just want something simple to get the emotion of the moment off. And then you need to make it good now. Like Greg was saying, you know, give them that refund, give them a coupon, go deliver that makeup order, do whatever you can right now to make it better. But then you want to fix it forever. The problem is you need to you need to bifurcate your feedback into this is a one off that maybe Greg is having a bad day and he came into my restaurant.

speaker-2 (15:18.426)
and he just like wants to vent? Or is this a consistent complaint? Is this something that, that they’re going to be doing forever, that, that we need to fix forever to make sure it doesn’t happen again? So any thought on this process?

It doesn’t always take giving something away. That’s the misconception in this. It sometimes just listen to them and apologize and then see how they respond. Obviously, if you forget a sauce, you’re not buying an entire meal again unless the guy sends you an entire just Bible, know, reasons why you screwed up and you know that it means something to them, then you’re going to buy them something.

You read the situation, but most consumers just want you to know that they weren’t happy. And if you give them an opportunity to tell you and you just wholeheartedly, sincerely say, I’m sorry, you’re going to this guest back.

I think that is so spot on and the data shows that in fact, we’ll get to this in a little bit but data shows that you don’t need to give away something you just need to take a little bit of time, right? And what we find is that over 99 % of people that are giving you feedback are genuinely trying to give you feedback. They’re not trying to rip you off. The problem is as restaurateurs with the margins that we have, we’re always looking at our

Is this one of the ones that it’s trying to rip us off? Is this one of the ones that’s trying to take advantage of our hospitality? And so that’s one of the things that we built into Ovation is we track who that guest is. So let’s say that someone comes in and complains three times. OK, make it more than right the first time. Make it right the second time. And then you could just say sorry the third time, just like, hey, our bad. Or invite them someplace else.

speaker-2 (17:12.447)
you can the other

When you get the serial complainer, sometimes you’re just not going to win. That’s why so many in this industry don’t want to do anything because they think everyone’s just a serial complainer out to get something. They’re not. They generally, and especially in today’s world, they’re deciding to spend money when money’s tight for most people in your restaurant. They expect it to be what they were hoping for or what they envisioned.

You have to take that at a whole level, different level of seriousness today than we did, you know, four or five years ago where everyone had cash in their pockets. Now they’re choosing you. So imagine them ordering a pizza on a Friday night. And again, either they’re from Fresh Brothers, Marcos, whoever you want to go and order pizza from, but you order a pizza on a Friday night and it’s wrong. And it was your family’s meal and you spent your $30 for delivery and everything else.

They forgot a topping. Okay, a mistake happens, but to that family, they spent their entire 30 bucks. Not saying you’re sorry or not having something to sort of help recover that guess is you’re hanging yourself. And that’s where you have to now, you have to deploy other avenues to make sure that you can win these people back.

Well, and to the point of tracking them, let’s say that you forgot sauce in someone’s bag and it’s a $10 order. But when you look at that person, you can see, hey, they place like once a month, they place like a $3,000 catering order. And if you forgot the sauce in the bag, then yeah, you wanna go like way above and beyond and make sure that that person feels happy and seen. But the problem is if you’re treating every single

speaker-2 (19:04.334)
every single complaint as a one off and you’re not consistently tracking who is that guest and are they coming back? You’re missing out on a huge opportunity to increase your brand. Cause as we, as you were talking about with catering, I mean, I was in a big chicken last week. I showed up and there were two $4,000 catering orders that were there ready to go. Imagine starting your day with $8,000 in the till.

And by 11 o’clock, those orders are out the door. That is like, it’s a great feeling, right? But now…

That’s

I was very happy with that day.

Yes.

speaker-2 (19:46.414)
But now imagine that you messed something up with that catering order and you don’t have a way to hear from them. I mean, that’s why it’s so important that you don’t just connect with guests that are dining in. And that’s awesome to go up to the table and to do the perfect table touch. And I’ve seen Greg do it and Greg, you’re great at that. And that’s so important. But what about the DoorDash orders? What about when they call in? What about when they leave the review?

What about, you know, if you have your survey tool to have something to pull all of this in is critical because you can’t just ask your, your guests that are dining in with you. Cause that is increasingly becoming a smaller and smaller percentage of what revenue is right now. And one thing I want to talk about with, sorry, go ahead.

Those guests are the ones that are going to let you know something is wrong more than your dining guests. Your dining guest is more likely going to tell you it was fine, it was good, was whatever, and not complain because they get the experience, the service level, everything else that goes on in a restaurant, they get the vibe. These customers, the ones that take the product to go home, the third party orders, eat it outside, whatever it is, they don’t get the whole experience of what your brands are.

So these people are even more important in making sure that you win them back because they have a library of people when they’re going on DoorDash and all the third parties to be able to pick from. You screw up once, you’re not gonna get them back. So they take the time to tell you anything. You gotta respond to them and win them back. You gotta take that opportunity.

Now, okay, for everyone listening, I need you to watch this because there’s gonna be a whole bunch of numbers up here on the screen. And this is so powerful. What we’re gonna talk about is, you know, we showed you the concept of service recovery paradox. Here’s how the data actually plays out. The average guest has a 30 % retention rate. So if we look at, you know, recency frequency spend,

speaker-2 (21:59.278)
30 % retention rate, let’s call it just an average spend. They come in once every eight months and there’s a 1 % likelihood of them leaving you a five-star review. If they love you, that doubles the retention rate. The spend actually drops a little bit, but that’s because they’re doing a little bit less menu exploration. Maybe they’re not as keen to try the LTOs because they want to try the thing that works for them. They come in twice as often.

and they’re nine times more likely to leave you a five-star review. If they’re upset and you don’t respond to them, 13 % chance they’re gonna come back. Okay, and keep in mind, this is, we followed 150,000 unique guests over the course of 18 months dining out. So this data is not like, hey, what little teeny sample size, like this is legit data here. Now, if you respond to that same exact group of unhappy guests,

68 % retention rate. They spend $5 more at each subsequent visit. They come in every 1.7 months and they are 12 times more likely to leave you a five-star review. Meaning that an unhappy guest recovered is not worth one or two or three times an average guest. They are worth 24 times the value of an average guest. And here’s the powerful thing. We’re talking a lot about AI. think actually Will Gidera did a funny post today.

about how he rewrote his book, Unreasonable Hospitality, all about AI and, know, AI wrote the whole book and it was kind of funny. But I will say, data shows that the ovation AI, we actually are 10 % better at recovering an unhappy guest than humans. And it’s because we’re able to take some of the emotion out of that of like, oh, that didn’t happen. like, you know, someone says it was a long wait and you go and you check,

the the till and you’re like okay you go check the receipts and you’re like okay well this is they only waited they only waited seven minutes it’s like okay but for me as a father of four if i gave my wife a break and i let her just like stay home by herself and i take my four kids out you want to know how long seven minutes is with four kids running around a restaurant that is a long time so i don’t care if your receipt

speaker-2 (24:23.598)
says that I got my food in seven minutes. It’s like, it still was a long time. That’s how I felt about it. And so our AI is able to listen, to respond, and to use millions of data points of what gets customers to come back in and use that to bring people back in. So anyway, any thoughts here, Greg, on the actual value? Because I know we’ve been talking about this in philosophy, but I think the value is really incredible to me.

actually think you’re underreporting it.

think the frequency, a ovation response guess is greater based on what we’ve seen. And especially when they were negative at the beginning. So when you have a customer that you can go out and reach, and again, remember with a system like ovation, you catch them before they go and post it on the public sites. So it’s in your infrastructure, it’s in your…

your system so no one else sees this. And when you have that opportunity to make it right and win, you’re going to get them back more often than the 1.7 times a month because the people that are taking the time to scan the receipt and spend that want to be a diehard fan. You know, when they’re using ovation, the ones that just want to complain are going directly to Google directly to still, but the ones that take the time to use this type of system really want to love you. So the opportunity to win them back is far greater.

And speaking of online reviews, think I want to show a bad example of how not to respond to an online review. And then I want to show a big chicken example of how they used ovation to turn a negative into a positive. my wife, Annie, we went on a date to a pizzeria. We’re talking a lot about pizza here, but that’s because I I got pizza on the mind, man. I just came back from Pizza Expo. A lot of pizza love, but.

speaker-2 (26:21.166)
went to a pizza restaurant and she said, left a review, three-star review, pizza was on the lower end of okay, wouldn’t go back. Now look, I get that this probably wasn’t the most helpful review, but Greg, if you saw this review coming on Google, how would you respond to it? What would you have said to Annie?

I would ask for a, hey, I’m sorry that you had this experience. Could you please contact me and give an email address and get more information from you and help make it right? That would have been my response.

Bam. And by the way, you could also give them your ovation location phone number and that way they can text you and then you can track who that customer is and see have they complained, what did they order, things like that. Well, this person was not in that mindset, Greg.

I’ve also seen this example. I don’t know how many times in my life.

So this owner says, thank you for your comment. You must be a pizza expert for you to make that comment or know what a real homemade made from scratch pizza with everything fresh and custom made fresh pizzas all about or you’re used to frozen pizza. Annie then goes back in updates her.

speaker-1 (27:40.002)
Can you imagine having the nerve to actually insult the customer?

For what? Like, what does this do for them as a restaurant? I don’t know. Anyway.

I want to know where this was so can go visit him.

actually, actually should we see if they’re still in business?

I bet you they are. Here we go. 4.1 stars, 400, 894 reviews. They’re still, they’re still kicking. They’re above the fours, but they’re, they’re going at it, right? And looks like, uh, Oh, thank you so much for your honest and fair review. So anyway, it looks like he might be changing his tone a little bit. Um, but if we go to lowest ratings, Oh, this, he, he goes off on these people. He is.

speaker-0 (28:25.996)
Wow.

speaker-2 (28:32.27)
Sorry that it bothered you. asked for information about your reservation. Okay. Well, he’s, we got a feisty odor here, but to my wife, he said, oh yeah, that’s what he said. So my wife responded, I wouldn’t call myself a pizza expert, but do I subscribe to pizza today? Yep. Did I attend the international pizza expo in Vegas this year? Of course. And as someone who has lived in Italy and gets New York city pizza every few months, I do know a little. And the only thing worse than your response to my honest review of the pizza was your soggy calamari.

now what’s crazy is I posted this on Facebook and got a ton of feedback. And by the way, the only reason that I pulled up their Google reviews right now in this webinar is because this is all public. Like this is what the owner portrays of here is what here is how I want my brand to be seen. And here’s how I want to respond to unhappy customers. It’s like, I don’t get it. They’re still in business. So.

I’m not going to say they’re doing something, doing everything wrong, but I will say there’s better ways to treat guests than with. Yeah. but let’s go to big chicken and let’s see how big chicken handles things. They got, this is, this is a interesting, so they got a response through ovation. Now the beautiful thing about this is it was private. It was not, it was not on Google or Yelp. Someone

the QR code or after they placed down an order, they got the text message. They clicked the two question survey and he said it was not super happy. Paying $35 and not receiving edible food on top of that, not getting a response to my complaint will result in me never doing business with you guys again. I didn’t even care for a refund to your point, Greg, right? Within my first inquiry, but you guys should be notified of the incident. Quite ridiculous and disappointed, honestly. Now.

What happened?

speaker-2 (30:31.662)
Teresa from Big Chicken responds. Hello, uses their name, uses, Teresa’s name and says who she’s from. Right. So right off the bat, just nails it of building that rapport, building that connection. Thank you for your feedback. I’m only now seeing your request for contact and I’m so truly sorry. It looks like they, they started off with an email instead of using ovation. So

didn’t really see that. I’m truly sorry to hear about your experience with the order delaying your response. I would like to send you a gift card to replace a combo that you could not enjoy. Please provide me with your address. I’ll get that to you ASAP. We value your input. Committed to improving your service. Your feedback is important to us. We appreciate you bringing this to our attention. So again, empathy, speed, action, and the response came back. You are awesome. Cheers.

I appreciate you taking time to read my review and make it right. Otherwise I wasn’t too sure I’d be revisiting Big Chicken again. Once again, thank you and take care. I love that this is like not only an upset guest, but an upset guest who reached out through an ineffective way of email. when they finally used ovation to jump in, to respond to them quickly and to get this kind of empathy, I think is just so impressive. And I think this is…

how this was handled in, from what I know about you, Greg, is how you would have handled this of making sure that you make a right.

before me, Patricia does, they do a good job. Yeah. But then again, they also went on ovation because someone told them to back in the day. take credit for their success before I even owned this company. I was a partner in this company.

speaker-0 (32:20.813)
Well, there.

They’re awesome. think, just, that, hey, that same mentality, which is why they do so well with, you know, fits so well in the big chicken family is because they can.

Yeah, but what’s amazing about ovation is that you make it easy to respond. So a lot of the times when you have to pull all of this from different sources and everybody knows it’s tedious. So as you’re doing it and having to respond, ovation allows you to do it fast and quick and in a way that makes sense in without it ever being a chore to do. And I laugh, but I do it on a Friday and Saturday night. I’m on ovation.

And I’m responding to customers because I know my managers are busy. So I’m the one sending their responses. And my wife looks at me all the time and my kids, and they’re like, uh, what are you doing? Oh, I’ve responded to something. And they’re like, why? like, cause I find it fun. It’s important. Um, it’s so important in this industry and to find a system that does it and a way to do it where you can win them back. And even a good experience when they just give you a compliment.

Most people don’t even respond to those five star reviews. But being able to say thank you, you know, we appreciate you means a lot to these customers. You have to do it.

speaker-2 (33:38.222)
And I think one of the best ways to really show them that you heard them is, which is in that last piece, that third piece of Fix Forever, there’s this concept of Kaizen, which is continuously changing for good. And to fix it forever, it requires two things. You need to track, which is where Ovation comes in for that accountability. But then you need to train, which is teach me why and show me how. The problem is,

Sometimes there are brands who have really good tracking mechanisms. They really wanna, let’s analyze every single online review and we’ll do long form surveys, but they’re not training their staff well. And so what happens is if you don’t train your team well against the problems that are happening, then they’re gonna find their own way. But let’s say that you’re training and…

You’re someone who you’re great at training. feel really strong here. It’s the problem is if you don’t have a way to track it, then this is like sitting in training. I took my took my son, Marty Disneyland. We’re going up our very first roller coaster of the day. He was telling me how brave he’s going to be. And that’s just like sitting in training. But then when you actually implement that training, it looks a lot more like the first dip like that, where

It is just, I love that. It just like ages a hundred years right here. And I think it’s so important to realize that this is what happens. And so to your point, like on that Friday night, all of the training that you did on Monday, that’s out the door. They’re just in survival mode, not in, wait, how did I train? And in fact, Big Chicken, we…

were able to work with, you know, we partnered up with Opus, their training platform. And what we found was we were able to identify that sauce and bag was a big problem. And by using the training modules, they were able to go re-implement training and sauce and bag issues decreased by 48 % overall. And in some locations was totally eliminated. And these are the things that are great. It’s wonderful.

speaker-2 (35:57.304)
to say, I’m sorry I missed your sauce. But if you’re saying, I’m sorry I missed your sauce four times in a row, what does the guest think? No, they’re not actually that sorry if they’re not trying to like make it better, right?

And Opus has their, your connection with Opus was a nice surprise and benefit because I’m a big fan of both. you know, glad to see when it works.

Well, and, and that’s the thing. I think that, and you are someone who I’ve seen you in training. You know, when we went to go do some store visits and you brought your whole team and we were going to sit, actually, we were going to sit in a training room for the whole day. And last minute, the night before Greg called a bus and said, I need a bus here in the morning because we’re not sitting here. And.

You canceled all of the meetings for the whole day of all the training that we were going to be sitting in. And what did you do, Greg?

We got on the bus to go to the store, because I was not happy with what my mystery shops were the day before.

speaker-2 (37:10.08)
and you got in there and you retrained and Greg was, Greg was not retraining from his ivory tower. Greg was there on the grill. He was showing them how to cook the food because the, the consistency is so important. If you don’t nail consistency, because that’s what people are paying for. And if they don’t get what they’re paying for, that’s a really easy way to, to get negative reviews. In fact,

Accuracy is one of the is actually the number one reason that you’re going to get a negative review is if you have an inaccurate order and so Talk to you about your philosophy on on training

I mean, it’s the hub mark and the most important thing you do in the industry. training and checklists are the two things that I live and die by. So if you don’t have a checklist and you get on an airplane and the pilot doesn’t go through a checklist, obviously you don’t want to be on that flight. Something’s going to get missed, you’re going to have a bad experience, you could die. I use the example all the time that why would you go into a restaurant at the checklist and the training aren’t being followed 100 % of the time, all the time in there.

And so we use training and systems to make sure that our customers continually have the experience that they need to have in as consistent of an environment as they can. And when something goes wrong, we look back to see if training failed or the systems and procedures failed. If either of those do, we fix them. If it was the employee just didn’t follow them, we go ahead and redirect with the employee. But we look at that every day. And it’s the same with

On a customer feedback, if we’re getting an example and we found this before and I’ve had this conversation with you that I started noticing back almost two years ago that people started talking about price in our restaurants, that it was getting a little expensive, that it was getting to be a little bad. was, you know, there was an issue coming. So two years ago we introduced whole menu lines, not.

speaker-1 (39:13.194)
Value menu is not cheapening, not discounting, but whole menu segments on a different product to drive our price down because our consumers were talking about price through ovation. We were able to see this data beforehand. And if you’re not constantly in tune with everything, you’re not going to be able to get to where you need to be and be ahead of the curve. Ovation, Opus, having great training in systems and procedures and always going back to those things is what allows you to be ahead of the game.

And right now, it’s like you have to be ahead of things.

And right now everyone is catching up to what we did two years ago. And last year, my sales and some of these restaurants were down 20 and 30%. But I dropped my check average for $5. And the consumer responded by going down to that value prop. was ahead of the curve this year. So those same restaurants are up 40, 50, 60%. And customer accounts are up. But I was able to bait it. And we felt the pain early. But we’re not feeling it now. We’re above what we were at the height because we made this drastic change beforehand.

And I remember going into my board meeting and telling them I was doing this and my board looked at me like I was nuts. How can you, we have to do this now or otherwise in a year or two years, we’re not gonna be able to do it fast enough. And it was all because of I was sitting on the couch on a Saturday night and I started looking and reading through the probation surveys and price started becoming an issue.

I think that is why I love working with brands like and people like you, Greg, is because you don’t just care about the guest experience today. You’re not looking at this today, at this week, at this quarter. You’re you’re taking a long term approach of how we how do we build a brand that creates people that not just come in one time or a couple of times, but for a lifetime. And you really adopt that and and take, you know, take this seriously of

speaker-2 (41:04.524)
really asking, making it good now and fixing things forever.

That’s the only way you can operate. You have to create cult followings in your restaurants. People forget that that’s really what’s going to drive where you go. Everyone has good food these days. You can’t be in business without having good food. Great food is something, but it’s a cult following, something different with the brand. That’s a level of service, a level of hospitality, branding and environment. Food, it all goes hand in hand.

And you’ve got to build and work on that every day in every aspect of the business. And tools like Ovation allow you to help build that and become that cult following for your group. And I can’t say it enough when you win back a customer, when you recover that customer, they become part of your cult if you do it right. They will tell four, five, six, seven, 20, a hundred people what you did for them and how you made it right. Where that person who just says, fine,

not going to tell anyone anything. You may have had a great experience, but just find that person you recover is going to be your best form of advertising.

And I think that that is, that’s really the philosophy. I that we’ve talked a little bit about ovation, but just so people can kind of see this, we start with a two question survey and it starts with how was your experience? And they either come in through our call to text phone solution, one of our 50 integrations or QR codes. And if they’re happy, we invite them to do things that are going to drive revenue. They could join your catering club. They can leave you a positive review. They could buy a gift card.

speaker-2 (42:47.594)
If they were unhappy, we have AI that will help them to recover that guest to make sure that they’re coming back in your tracking. And then again, our AI will help you understand, is this a one-off or is this a consistent trend that you need to be looking at? And then we can actually set goals for every location to make sure that they’re easily, they know exactly what they need to do to improve and that you can track that in a single place. And then

because we’re collecting all of this data in one place, you could text them to bring them back on a slow day or if you’re doing an LTO. But the Ovation platform goes beyond just the two questions. And this is something, Greg, I took some direct notes from you. He gave me some feedback one time of, hey, I didn’t know that Ovation was like a full platform. I thought it just had like this feature. And so we want to make sure that people know that there’s long form surveys that call to text

replacing your phones, review and listings management powered by Marquee, catering optimization. You can now inbound, this is something that just got launched end of January, where on your Google My Business listing, you could actually chat back and forth with people through text. And so you could plug in the Ovation phone number there to text back and forth with that customer for inbound texting.

custom call to actions to drive things like loyalty visits and more. Like the Ovation platform is something that we have been building and growing since, you for almost 10 years now. And we are constantly innovating. In fact, during this last round of fundraising, we, lot of people are like, okay, so you’re going to like double your sales team, right? Turns out we actually reduced head count on our sales team.

And we doubled our engineering team, even though we had a full engineering team, we doubled it because we are so committed to building new things that are going to help you to not just collect that feedback and not just do something with it today, but make sure it’s actually driving revenue for you. So that being said, well, if you’re looking for an easy way to implement these three pillars, and if you’re looking for better ways to recover these guests and track how well they’re doing,

speaker-2 (45:11.042)
then great, please scan this QR code. We’re happy to schedule a free demo with you and show you why thousands of brands like Craveworthy are on the Ovation, getting their passports stamped at the Ovation Nation.

Well, we’ve got some questions if you’ve got time. Our first question, I’m sorry, sorry. Our first question is, responding sounds great, but it’s also time intensive. What if I don’t feel like I have the bandwidth to do this? So I’ll answer the operator. If you don’t have the bandwidth to do it, then you might as well shut your doors and you shouldn’t be an operator. This is part of what the business is going forward, is responding to our guests and being there.

You for sure have time when a customer complains in your restaurant. Why don’t you have time at somewhere else? I would be all over my team if they ever told me that there was not time to do something like this.

Greg, missing words.

That one bothers me. I mean, when you have an opportunity to talk to your customers, you have to take it.

speaker-2 (46:18.346)
And I will say that in addition to that, that is one of the reasons that AI is so powerful. is AI, can it replace you? No, it cannot. But can it help you? Yes. Like for example, if someone complains innovation, you literally click one button and it will give you a response. Like that response from Big Chicken, that was started with AI.

So she actually, as we look back at it, she actually clicked AI and we drafted a response for her. She went in, edited that response to give a little more personal touch for the situation and then boom, sent it off. And so the thing is, if you don’t have time, you’re able to use leverage AI and leverage technology to help allow you to do more faster. And it’s kind of like, ends up being like a, you know, like Iron Man suit.

where it can give you those superpowers that you might not have.

It’s just, it’s so important. You have to find time to do it. Just like you have to find time to market your restaurant, you have to do local store marketing and everything else. That’s just part of now the gig. And there’s time. Every restaurant in America has five minutes a day to respond to any reviews that they get. Well, how do you empower your frontline staff to make things right in the moment without needing manager approval? How do you give them that?

power. So I’m a big philosopher. I have a big philosophy that I learned from Ritz and the story of how they built it. Every customer that comes in, the people that deal with them have the responsibility to make it right. They can do whatever is needed at that time to win that customer back on how they feel. So if you’re a dishwasher and you see someone unhappy, you’re allowed to go ahead and bring them a dessert or whatever you think is going to make a smile on my customer’s face. That is just the standard that we apply.

speaker-1 (48:22.766)
And every company is so worried about, again, giving away too much or being taken advantage of, but they don’t realize the cost of not. And Ritz built a hotel, built this whole philosophy around, you know, their staff was empowered to always make something right, that they’re this renowned industry and their hospitality levels through the roof, but because they empowered their individual workers to make the guests happy.

And the cost, no matter what it is, is so small from losing that customer.

love that you can’t you can’t afford not to and I would just say that again with from that’s from a restaurant standpoint from a technology standpoint I will say you know innovation you could set up guardrails and so you could say give them the opportunity to say what offer could be given for what situation and then you can track that and so that way people aren’t taking advantage of like a $10 off and just giving that to everyone because you could track who’s giving their offers how many are getting redeemed

and follow that through as well as guardrails of what offers can be sent.

What metrics do you track to measure success in guest recovery?

speaker-2 (49:34.606)
Recovered guests. mean, like literally we we track that innovation of how many people how many people that were upset that you responded to are actually coming back. And so tracking that is critical. And you can also track what percentage of your guests had a negative experience and work on reducing that through our goals functionality.

Okay. sorry, Greg, go ahead. In my world, it would be the interaction with that customer afterwards. Most of the time when you give the customer something, they’re going to let you know how it was that next visit and you start building the rapport with them if you do it right. And it’s about building the rapport with the customers that take the time. So they do give you that feedback.

So when we send a review or when we respond, we ask, hey, when you come back in, you please let us know how we did? Here is our email to send it directly here. You can come back and leave us another ovation review if that’s where we talk to them. But we always ask for that because we want to build that connection with that team and that employee with that customer.

Okay, we’ve still got time for questions. If anybody wants to ask any, please just put them in the Q &A. We do have one in there. I was in the wrong spot. I was in chat. There’s a Q &A tab.

Look at that. How do other tools different to innovation?

speaker-1 (51:03.528)
I think that was supposed to be ovation.

So I have had the honor of working with many of them in the different companies that I have bought over the last couple of years. And I will say that they all do something similar. They all get you the guest feedback. What I have learned is that I leave every one of them and move everybody over to Ovation because I think it’s the best in class for this type of review and for this type of

service. So I’ve not ever stayed with one of the other customers or one of the other vendors.

What are the tools? Well, I appreciate that Greg and and what other tools have you found to be most important to you? I know that we often talk about R365 and toast as as being some other great tools.

So would

speaker-1 (52:01.002)
My, I mean, my tech stack is the restaurant 365 toast ovation. and you know, that’s my tech stack. Those are the ones that I believe in buy in and where we try to simplify. And then you add hope or sound for the training and first checklist component. That’s my tech stack and anybody can email me anytime. And I will give you contacts, information, who to talk to on anything. but my tech stack does not vary. I’m all in on one group all the time.

speaker-1 (52:33.454)
All right, well that’ll do it for our webinar today. We’d like to thank our viewers. Greg, Zach, thanks so much for being with us today.

Thank you. And thanks Greg. I always appreciate you, man.

And Marco’s pizza, just because I saw that you were on, I called you out. Ovation kicks in. Oops, I swore, but what else is new? All right. Thanks, guys. Thank you.