Hwy 55 Burgers, Shakes, and Fries: 75 Percent Faster Review Response

Hwy 55 Burgers, Shakes and Fries is dedicated to its customers with excellent service. The company is also dedicated to its customers in ways that extend beyond the restaurant’s service offerings.

The exciting, fast-paced 1950s-style diner is heavily involved in its customers’ local communities: It’s not just a restaurant that serves fresh burgers and award-winning sweet tea, it’s also a restaurant that creates positive experiences for its guests in their daily lives.

“We tend to go into smaller communities where we can be the go-to burger joint,” says Andy Moore, director of communications at Hwy 55. “A lot of that has to do with how we market ourselves, the partnerships we try to have with local schools, sports teams, and fundraisers we hold.”

One way this open-kitchen restaurant accomplishes that local feel is by listening to what its customers are saying. In order to stay true to its service, Hwy 55 monitors and analyzes every element of customer feedback.

The team efficiently monitors and analyzes its customers’ feedback across online review sites using ReviewTrackers.

The Challenge: Problems with Line of Sight into Customer Feedback Across 134 Franchise Locations

Before Moore’s team started analyzing and monitoring customer feedback with ReviewTrackers, Moore knew that he was not capturing all possible customer data.

In the past, Moore’s team would use an Excel spreadsheet to collect all of the review pages that they could find. Then, they would manually go through each review site to collect any new reviews that came up in the past couple of days.

“Inevitably, things are going to slip and you’re not responding to the reviews as quickly as you should and you’re missing a lot of opportunities to improve operationally,” he says.

“The major frustration was knowing that things were falling through the cracks. Actually having a spreadsheet of every one of our review pages that we could find, then manually going down each one to see if any of the reviews would come up in the past couple of days.”

Making Sure the Team Is Focused on the “Right Things” within the Customer Experience

Moore knew he needed a process, a system, to respond to and engage with customers on review sites.

“In the past, we surveyed our customers and used a secret shopper program,” Moore says. “But it was pretty hit-and-miss and when it came time to actually respond to reviews and interact with

customers online. We were forced to pick our battles. To have a platform that enables us to respond to people quickly and figure out if we’re trending upwards and if we’re focusing on the right things has been super beneficial.”

The Solution Analyzing and Managing all Reviews on One Dashboard

Moore says having all reviews on one dashboard is one of the most useful features for the company. The Trending Topics feature also helps Moore’s team understand their customers.

“We’re starting to use Trending Topics more to get a feel for what customers are really liking and to focus on the right things,” he says.

Moore says he likes being able to quickly respond to all reviews – never missing one. The ReviewTrackers’ reporting feature is especially beneficial to the locations that need to improve the guest experience.

Users are able to download three different reports with this feature:

1. A high-level overview of the data from the dashboard.
2. A report of locations’ ratings/reviews.
3. A report of how individual locations compare to one another.

“Whenever we have a certain store that is trending in the wrong direction, reports have been really helpful to kind of give a historical view of where that store is at,” Moore says. “And on the dashboard, we use the average rating feature.”

Customer Feedback Is Used to Improve Operations Across All Locations

When it comes to how ReviewTrackers has helped Hwy 55’s operations, Moore says “there’s an example almost once a day.”

Although the team at Hwy 55 thought their wait staff was doing a great job greeting guests in a timely manner — when guests first sit down at a table — Moore’s team found out this wasn’t the case after analyzing keywords in reviews by utilizing the ReviewTrackers Trending Topics feature.

Moore’s team noticed that “waitress” correlated heavily with negative reviews. The team investigated the issue and found that at some locations, after guests initially sat down, waiters and waitresses were waiting too long to greet the guests.

Moore’s team took action on this insight.

“That enabled us to make that a priority in our training and onboarding process. We also used the opportunity to remind everyone in a company-wide email on the steps to greeting a customer and serving him or her as quickly as we can,”

Moore says. “It was interesting because we felt we were doing pretty O.K. at that and then we realized that it actually was a real pain point for us.”

Time Saved Responding to Reviews

ReviewTrackers has freed up a great deal of time for Moore’s team.

“I would be comfortable saying that it’s cut down the time it takes to respond to reviews by 75 percent,” Moore says. “It’s been a huge time-saver which is really really important to us as we continue to grow, especially with a pretty lean staff.”