CASE STUDY

Overview

The New World Trading Company is a gem in the British dining scene. Customers at any of the brand’s 28 locations will first notice the stunning interiors before they enjoy a wide variety of world-famous beers, unique cocktails, and classic and contemporary cuisines.

It feels like it is there to help, support and drive the team performance up, positively.” - Chris Hill, founder and former CEO of New World Trading Company.

Founded in 2011, the award-winning parent group’s constant drive for innovation and adventure has helped them cultivate a range of popular brands, including The Botanist, The Smugglers Cove, The Trading House, The Florist, and more.

Each of these brands feature its own unique setting and menu, providing guests with the opportunity for a new experience every time.

Thanks to these great experiences, The New World Trading Company (NWTC) has grown at a rapid pace. And with that growth, Founder and Former-CEO Chris Hill saw a need for more detailed customer experience data.

Challenges

• Traditional, outdated customer experience measurement methods
• Difficulty scaling customer feedback, making it difficult to implement changes
• Lack of insights to engage neutral guests and convert them to brand advocates
• Needed to maintain brand standards while the company grew

Outdated customer experience measurement

Before they worked with Yumpingo, The New World Trading Company relied on traditional methods of capturing customer experience data. These included mystery diner programs, post-visit emails, and Trip Advisor reviews. Unfortunately, each of these methods presented their own drawbacks.

“We had a mystery diner program, which by nature was retrospective, with long lead times between the visit and the report delivery.” Chris Hill, founder and former CEO of New World Trading Company said. “We also had post-dining emails, which were giving us a lot of information but it wasn’t at scale and it was hard to engage with or act on, especially so long after the event. It was really too easy to dismiss a poor experience as an exception or to explain it away somehow.”

The brand used Trip Advisor as a key metric, but ratings and reviews from those sources are often very polarized – most guests don’t leave a review unless they had either a very good experience or a very bad one.

“We weren’t getting the reviews from people who were 3s and 4s on a 5-star scale — the neutrals that we needed to hear from and act on, so that we could improve things, and convert them to advocates for our brand,” said Chris. 

Results from day 1

Focused on maintaining brand standards, service levels, and customer experience as the company grew, Chris Hill decided it was time to pilot Yumpingo’s customer experience management platform;

Chris explained how they used the pilot scheme, “We piloted it at Smugglers Cove in Liverpool, which was a great site, generating very good sales, but like all of your good sites there wasn’t anything that we couldn’t better understand and improve.” 

And the results were nearly instantaneous. “It was phenomenal – it opened our eyes immediately. We were quickly all over it, looking at the insights that were coming through and acting on them,”Chris said.

Thanks to Yumpingo’s insights, the NWTC team quickly realized that a couple of the menu’s staple dishes were actually scoring poorly on customer sentiment compared to other dishes.

“They looked great and read well on the menu, so performed strongly, sales-wise, but what was on the plate was not quite right and clearly needed improving,” Chris said.

The team also saw the Smugglers Cove location’s NPS was consistently low on Sundays — a day that many restaurant and hospitality employees want to take off.

“If you are not careful you end up not having enough of your A-team for a key shift,” Chris said. “If we are honest, we really already knew we didn’t always have the right people on, but suddenly we could really see from the system that it was impacting our customer experience.”

Hill and his team reacted accordingly on both of these issues and saw results almost instantaneously. The dish performance scores improved immediately, and the low NPS on Sundays improved in a matter of days.

“We had a two-week lag before we saw NPS improvement, and then there was a further two-week lag before we actually saw sales grow. At that point, the system really got the whole company’s attention,” Chris said.

‘What’s your Yumpingo score?’

Yumpingo quickly became an important part of the NWTC culture, informing staff reviews, bonuses, and any coaching and development requirements.

“Very quickly the language in our business right up to the executive level became not, ‘What’s your TripAdvisor score?’ but, ‘What’s your Yumpingo score?’ It was a guiding light to every dish and every shift. We could see significant positive NPS growth and that translated into financial performance too,” Chris said.

Yumpingo also helped to make capturing customer sentiment data a less personal and pointed experience. By gathering data at scale, the feedback was not overly critical, which helped adoption and buy-in among team members, according to Hill.

“It felt helpful, like it was galvanizing GMs, servers and our chefs to deliver a great experience for customers, and helping them manage the whole customer journey. It feels like it is there to help, support and drive the team performance up, positively.” Chris said.