CASE STUDY

Overview

Brands often have to address the negative impact poor experiences have on day-to-day operations before even thinking about scaling their business. Team members not showing up for shifts, poor service, inconsistent food quality – you name it.

Not Olive Tree Brasserie.

Dean Wilson, a 20+ year industry leader, saw a gap in the market with offering modern Greek/Mediterranean dining experiences. Not that similar concepts weren’t prevalent in the market – but from region to region the diversity of restaurants varied greatly.

Some might chalk this up to consumer preference. However, with Dean’s eye for authenticity and innovation, he knew he could deliver an unmatched experience that would keep customers coming back.

Dean established Olive Tree Brasserie in 2007 in Lytham St Annes. In the following years, he added two more restaurants to the Olive Tree family. Testing out new menus and appealing to locals and tourists alike cemented the brand for long-term success.

“It was quite enlightening once we saw our initial scores, but also really good to see what people actually felt about the food.” - Dean Wilson.

 

Challenges:

• Ineffective and costly method of capturing customer sentiment
• Inability to review feedback in realtime and make timely adjustments
• Inconsistency in capturing negative feedback
• Needed to maintain brand standards and expand email database for future growth

Continuing sustainable brand innovation

For a single venue, restaurant owners can control almost every aspect of brand operations. However, Dean is not the type of person to stop there. He knew in order to scale the business, captivate an audience in a new market and retain them, he had to deliver the best experience at every table. He wanted to nail it every time, at every location, with every guest.

The Olive Tree Brasserie team sought out a solution to help them understand what people loved about the brand and easily identify how to improve the customer experience.

“We previously relied on guests letting us know what they thought of the experience either verbally or by comments/scores on printed feedback cards that we gave out in the restaurant. We didn’t want to impose timely or unnecessary questionnaires or spend their time quizzing them whilst they were dining out with us.”  - Dean Wilson.

 

They kicked off their search by evaluating systems they already had in place. 

"We considered the platforms we already use to evaluate feedback, like email surveys, TripAdvisor, Google and Resdiary.” Dean Wilson said.

Individually, the platforms didn't give the team the full picture of what drove the customer experience.

“At the time, our actions were based on outdated data from multiple sources, which didn’t allow us to act efficiently. As we grew, we didn’t want to risk becoming complacent – thinking the best selling dishes would always be great, or not having the ability to quickly act enough to guests’ wants and needs,” Dean continued.

They wanted to capture honest, accurate, and up-to-date feedback that was easy to review, understand, and act upon, in order to save time and resources without negatively affecting the guest’s experience. “The timing was right for us as we knew we wanted to expand the business further. We wanted to be sure that our best sellers were still being enjoyed, we wanted to see what dishes weren’t working for us and why, and for our marketing team we wanted to expand on our email database quickly and easily.”

Making the move to next-gen technology

Through the years, Olive Tree Brasserie had experienced a few problems with the old way of navigating through customer experiences.

They didn't know the guests’ thoughts in  real-time, easy-to-read solution and the time taken to input and review the data the old way was lengthy. By the time the data was ready to review, it could have been too late to recover guests or amend any issues.

If a team member knew that a guest hadn’t had the best experience, there was a chance that the feedback card wouldn’t be issued or upper management wouldn’t hear about their experience until they complained about it via other, more prominent channels like TripAdvisor.

Guests likely didn’t feel comfortable giving their scorecards back or having their cards reviewed by their servers, which wasn't giving the Olive Tree team the whole story.

The monetary and environmental cost of providing the stationery (cards and pens) was high. Going digital felt like the only way forward.

In came Yumpingo. After implementing real-time customer experience management technology, the Olive Tree team was able to see and evaluate data quickly and easily so they could engage the right team members and act upon accurate, trustworthy data.

 

Managing today’s challenging industry outlook

No business can escape the challenges of today’s market. However, the team behind Olive Tree was well ahead of the curve, wanting to elevate the way they built experiences for team members and customers.

This meant leveraging Yumpingo insights to drill down into location, shift, server, and dish performance to understand where to focus the limited time they had available.

“The well-publicized staffing crisis the industry faces means we have put a huge focus on the best ways to find and keep talented individuals. Increasing food and drink costs are also another challenging aspect of navigating a post Brexit/global pandemic environment” - Mary Scotford, Marketing Manager at Olive Tree Brasserie.

As luck would have it, with a concept like Olive Tree, testing out new suppliers, service styles, or products is now a positive, exciting experience.

They used Yumpingo’s experience insights to uncover why they were getting the customer satisfaction scores they had been getting. This meant that A/B testing new suppliers or menu items became low risk, high reward. By drilling down into location, time of day, and even menu items, the team could customize questions to easily get the information they needed.

“We use Yumpingo to help us create award-winning menus. We can continually review and amend our menu at dish level – this helps us not only see our best performing dishes. We then use these dishes for exciting new opportunities, whether it be a pop-up shop, food festival or the next restaurant concept," Mary said.

"We change the survey questions for each initiative to follow suit. Whether that’s a Spring/Summer menu launch or a special event we can gather relevant, real-time feedback whenever we want,” Dean said.

At all times, cross-brand quality control remains at the forefront of everything they do.

“We want our food and dining experiences to be equally amazing across our restaurants. With Yumpingo, we can identify if one site is producing a dish that gets outstanding results versus another of our restaurants whose same dish is being rated as average. We can then work together to make any necessary improvements. It’s great for team collaboration,” Mary explained.

Team celebrations

At Olive Tree Brasserie, team members are at the centre of their success.

“We can see who our best performing team members are and often run competitions with powerful incentives across all our venues. We find these keep the team focused and excited in their day-to-day jobs."

"From seeing that data in Yumpingo, we can use that, praise them, help them where they need help, and build up their happiness so they stay. We want to keep people doing well, every day,” Dean shared. “Growth is success for us, which is one of the reasons why I was attracted to Yumpingo. We act on the data on the day it’s received.”

Mary echoed that sentiment, adding, “If you have a happy team, you’re successful. Having that happy team, if you’re looking at why they’re happy, they’ve got the data in front of them to work with and if they have that knowledge, it makes their job easier.”

And the data doesn’t ever have to sit with one department or team member. At Olive Tree, the kitchen and front of house teams also used Yumpingo in real-time, while the guest relations and marketing teams use the data on a daily/weekly basis.

As a final remark, Dean shared; “I would recommend Yumpingo to others because it’s easy to use for the team, easy for the guests to use, and great for the marketing and management teams to review both kitchen and FOH performance so we know exactly where to prioritize our resources.”