Consistent listening to customer feedback boosts loyalty
When Garden Fresh asks, it gets answers. Deep textual analysis scrutinizes the large volumes of comments received from customers, identifying and prioritizing topics that concern them.
Garden Fresh Restaurant Corp., a chain of 104 buffet-style restaurants based in San Diego, California, uses customer feedback to help drive its targeted customer service experiences. As a result, Garden Fresh offers customers many ways to voice their opinions on everything from food to the decor. However, the volume of customer feedback eventually became overwhelming. Processing comments, especially from unstructured information, like 60-second sound bites and comments in open-ended forms, became a barrier to finding out what was actually on customers' minds.
In the Customer's Words
“Overtone helps us detect emerging issues much more quickly and reliably than would be possible if we were doing it manually. They take all of our guest comments, and organize and analyze the information to reveal trends from month to month. For years we have been monitoring this information. Now we can do it much more efficiently, and drill down as necessary.”
Jill Trecker
Guest Loyalty Manager
Garden Fresh Restaurant Corp
Using natural language processing technology, open-ended customer feedback is combined with structured information such as demographic data, customer records, and closed-end survey responses. Sophisticated data mining algorithms, based on dozens of patented models, analyze text from all customer-interaction channels, sorting comments into categories and detecting trends.
The results are presented in a series of reports accessible through an intuitive dashboard interface. Service managers can quickly identify the issues that Garden Fresh customers are concerned with—like bringing back an item taken off the menu, or improving the acoustics of dining rooms—and use the insights to take action. Responding to feedback by implementing customer ideas really emphasizes the commitment Garden Fresh has made to its customers.
And, says Trecker, "It fosters customer loyalty and makes people more excited to come in and dine with us"
