Challenges

• Pricing and margins challenges
• Lack of clarity on guest sentiment across individual locations
• No live view of feedback
  
  

Overview

Yumpingo worked with The Restaurant Group to improve customer experiences and deliver satisfaction growth ahead of the acquisition of the Leisure Division by Big Table Group in 2023.

The Restaurant Group (TRG) operates around 400 restaurants and pub restaurants throughout the UK, but most of the public know them by their individual high street brand names, including Chiquito and Frankie & Benny’s.

The contribution of Yumpingo to the financial success of TRG was so critical in that it was mentioned in their full end of year results announcement for 2022 (16th March 2022):

"The business has delivered an encouraging trading performance, achieving LFL sales growth of +14%, outperforming the market by 7%. Our partnership with Yumpingo has provided greater customer insight on both customer service standards and dish feedback, and we have seen an improving trend on NPS scores (as measured on the Yumpingo platform) for both Frankie & Benny's and Chiquito."

Solving current hospitality issues

Reflecting on the recent past Jon Knight, Chief Executive, Leisure and Concessions for The Restaurant Group explained why maintaining your brand promise is so important, “With the cost of living crisis and prices rising all the time, it's incumbent on us as hospitality operators to make sure that when customers come into our restaurants, we give them the treat they so richly deserve. That we listen to them, we serve them great food, and we give them great service, all in an environment that's relaxed and friendly.”

 

Pricing in restaurants

If restaurateurs thought getting menu pricing right was vital to a successful business in the past, then recent years have hammered that truth home. As prices increased at higher rates than expected, due to changes across the political and economic landscape, Jon said one of their strongest tactics was using Yumpingo to gather guest sentiment feedback: “We listen to our customers. We [did] that through using Yumpingo.”

Ben Keggans, Executive Chef, Frankie & Benny's; “We’re always trying to stave off price rises or [see] where we can have the most impact and not pass on those costs to our customers. We continuously review our products and look at other suppliers, never compromising on quality.”

Managing pricing, keeping their brand promise strong, growing their business and developing menu items and marketing strategies worked for their bottom line. Achieving that without impacting the footfall of return guests coming back made them a valuable investment opportunity.

Gavin O'Neill, Senior Operations and Guest Experience Manager for TRG added, "What Yumpingo gives us [is] the opportunity to understand how we deliver those experiences."

Whatever the changes in food costs, restaurants should stay focussed on not pricing their menus so high that guests stop coming through the door. Jon Knight continued, “We get insights from all of our customers around the price point; whether it's too high, too low or whether it's good value for money. We pull all the data, we look at the cost of goods, and we make sure that we don't reach a ceiling that's unaffordable for our customers.”

Customer feedback at the time of service

Jon said that part of the value of Yumpingo is immediate guest sentiment feedback. “We're getting that level of detail from the customer at the point of sale. Guests aren’t leaving the restaurant, getting stuck in a traffic jam, or not finding their car and then doing a post-dining survey with lots of different influences affecting their decisions.”

This was reinforced by TRG's Marketing Director for Leisure and Concessions, Andreia Harwood , "The opportunity for guests to deliver feedback while still at a venue means what they’ve eaten is still fresh in their minds. They’ve just had the experience. It's going to be as close to the truth as possible.”

By filling in the Yumpingo 1-Minute Smart Survey at the table, guests give their genuine feelings about a dish, without being influenced by other factors when they walk out of your venue. “They're giving you the real information at the time that they've just seen the server, eaten the food and paid.”

Gavin explains how Yumpingo gave them a broad and clear overview of what was happening beyond the insights other feedback platforms might offer: "Historically a guest experience measure is a really small snapshot into a business or the way they run a business. And let's be honest, anyone can have a bad shift or a bad day. Yumpingo gives us a blended view of our business every minute, every day. Off the back of that, we get some interesting and actionable insights to make informed decisions.”

Colleague support for using Yumpingo

Initially, staff might wonder how much using a guest sentiment feedback platform is going to interfere with the customer’s experience. The key is good communication, said Jon. “Giving all restaurant colleagues an understanding of why we're doing it, what we're doing it for, and how we're going to use that information.”

"We can also trap some incredible NPS data that we can use to build better service in the restaurants."

Data and increasing NPS points

Jon explained how being able to use Yumpingo to get NPS scores allows TRG to see where they are compared to competitors "Knowing where we can be benchmarked against our competition and knowing that we've got our guests behind us, we have great satisfaction surveys within Yumpingo and we have great food and beverage ratings within Yumpingo."

Yumpingo gave TRG a detailed understanding of how each menu item was performing through seamless POS integrations. “[It] gives me great data on the whole menu. I can track a dish across a time period and see how it's performing,” explained Ben Keggans, Executive Chef for TRG’s Frankie & Benny's brand.

Insights that lead to improved training

 

Being able to see what was happening across each location helped Ben to track how food was performing at individual restaurants across the whole brand. “I could be sitting in a restaurant and I can watch what is going on with guests and what they're saying in that particular restaurant,” Ben explained. This means he can find out if chefs have introduced incorrect practices or altered the recipe in any way. If there are any discrepancies, he can work with the kitchen teams to develop a training program to keep delivering the brand promise.

The Yumpingo difference

For Ben, the biggest difference between Yumpingo and other feedback providers is “the amount of data we get on each dish. You get portion size, value, [and] you can get the perception on there. We can dial down into the feedback from what the guest is telling us.”

And the need for a lot of data to make informed decisions is critical, as Jon Knight continued, “When you work in a service industry, you need to get big data. You need to get insight from everybody. We see many thousands of customers each week. We allow them to give us data, information, and their experiences.”

Trial by fryer

“It was very good when doing trials. We did a Bolognese trial where we changed the recipe. And we changed the presentation because we were getting a lot of negative feedback. Very quickly, it was apparent that when we changed the spec [at one location], our guest scores massively improved. We were then able to change the other locations to the new spec. We got much better scores from our guests, much happier guests as well.”

“What we want to do when we do a trial is that we want to make sure there is an improvement. We're not just changing it because we think it's the right thing to do. We could make the change without Yumpingo, but we wouldn’t get that feedback from the guests saying ‘We like this dish. It's much better and ratifying that this dish has been improved.” 

Shaping marketing strategies

Andreia Harwood, Marketing Director at TRG, found the real-time feedback available with Yumpingo gave them reassurance when they were developing marketing strategies. “I think what's great about Yumpingo is the fact that I can get feedback in real-time as it happens.”

“Yumpingo helps us get an idea of the mindset of our customer straight after the experience and allows us to analyze the data and decide what we need to do to make sure we're hitting that 100% mark. it just means that we get a lot more feedback than we would have using a more traditional survey post-visit.” 

 

Getting the marketing team onboard

Andreia explained more about the marketing “I think what's great about the data that comes from Yumpingo is, we all have assumptions of what we think is happening. So Yumpingo actually either backs up what we thought to be true or shows us that actually, we don't have a problem with a particular dish. It helps us focus on where we have to make genuine change as opposed to going on assumptions on what we think.”

Jon Knight said, “We build the menus, we look at where we've done limited-time offers before. We track all of the data and we build credible offers for our customers. The key thing that we use Yumpingo for now, is for menu engineering and building the menu. So we look at all of the data on a weekly, monthly basis.”

Supporting you in success

Andreia said the Yumpingo Customer Success team’s support is vital to getting the most out of the data. “We get a lot of support from Yumpingo. What I think is super-flexible is the ability to just remove any questions we might have, any uncertainties and just know that we're working towards the right direction and that the changes and the decisions that we're making are the ones that our guests want to see.

"It helps us to drive the change that our customers want to see, particularly for us around food quality perception and having our food come back scoring highly makes us confident that we're going in the right direction."

Understanding what customers want, particularly when they come in with their families meant that TRG could shape their marketing strategies for busy holiday periods, like half-term. “Using that data will help shape the next 12 months of our marketing calendar and help drive some of the strategies that we're trying to implement,” Andreia said.

"Whenever we're targeting our guests that have visited and asking them to come back instead of serving the same dish that they had previously we’re able to upsell because we’re effectively telling them; ‘We know you like this, so why don't you try this next time?’ “

Ben Keggan said the simplicity helps with using Yumpingo. “We've had other data where it's quite complex. I find Yumpingo very easy to use. The data is very easy to analyze. You can target where you want to be."

I can look at today's data, I can look at yesterday’s data at seven days' data. And it tells me which dish is underperforming.” – Ben Keegan

What would menu engineering be like without Yumpingo’s data insights? “I think it would be very much a finger-in-the-air and guesswork really, without Yumpingo.” Ben said. “We would only really have sales data to go on and manager’s feedback. Whereas Yumpingo is telling you, actually it's a very niche [issue] in this area or this one site.”

 

Talk to one of our sales team today >