Dive Brief:
- Pizza chain Mellow Mushroom, which has 200 locations, allows each franchisee to customize the decor of their psychedelic-inspired locations, but the chain works to create a consistently strong customer experience (CX) across all its restaurants. One way it accomplishes this is through “Tell Mellow,” its online portal for customer feedback that receives 14,000 pieces of feedback each month, per a case study made available to Marketing Dive.
- Along with Tell Mellow, Mellow Mushroom also tracks post-visit surveys and brand/location mentions on Facebook, TripAdvisor and Yelp. The total Voice of Guest platform brings all that data to one place to ease the tracking and reporting burden, said Annica Kreider, VP of Brand Development at Mellow Mushroom, in the case study.
- The company began partnering with InMoment, a CX insights platform, in 2015 to develop and manage Tell Mellow and since that time it has seen increases across a range of customer metrics, most notably a 17% increase in customers who say they are “likely to recommend” the chain.
Dive Insight:
The Mellow Mushroom case study offers marketers two important takeaways. One is the importance of the customer experience, whether it’s at a physical location like a pizza joint or the user interface for an app. The goal is to make the experience positive, of course, but to also make it easy for customers to provide feedback.
The second takeaway is the advantages of keeping data collection as simple as possible. Some data is very unstructured and may be even unknown before it becomes part of the pipeline while data coming in from customer service and feedback like Mellow Mushroom’s Tell Mellow portal, surveys and social media tracking is a known entity. Putting that data into one place such as Mellow Mushroom’s customer feedback platform makes it much more manageable and useful. The InMoment platform helps Mellow Mushroom analyze both types to ensure dining experiences are customized to each neighborhood location and to deliver automated recommendations to franchisees and regional business coaches.
“Where we used to have disparate, siloed systems, we now have a comprehensive Voice of Guest platform that organically brings all of our data into one place,” Kreider said in the case study. “This drastically decreases the tracking and reporting burden at both the corporate and franchisee level with a single sign on, streamlining the workday.”