By ALAN  J.  LIDDLE

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(July  14, 2008) Managers have told restaurant employees about customer calls of complaint or praise since the advent of the telephone, but new technology providing real-time distribution of call recordings is changing worker-coaching initiatives.

Dallas-based Cozymel’s Mexican Grill currently uses devices for on-table payment, multimedia promotions, entertainment and guest-surveying at a unit in Grapevine, Texas, and the chain plans to implement the technology at two additional branches.

“You can sit down with an employee and tell them about a problem, and they’ll say, ‘That didn’t happen,’” said Jerry Kenney, senior vice president of corporate operations for franchisor Papa Murphy’s International Inc. of Vancouver, Wash. PMI operates or franchises more than 1,000 Papa Murphy’s Take ‘N’ Bake Pizza restaurants in several states. Continuing, Kenney said of a recorded customer complaint or pat on the back, “When you can play it, that is powerful with the crew.”

“You can hear the emotion” in the caller’s voice, added Kevin O’Leary, another user of the technology. He is the managing partner of a franchised The Melting Pot fondue specialty restaurant owned by Chas & Chas Inc. in the Chestnut Hill area of Philadelphia. Because the call recording is delivered via e-mail or pulled from a website as an MP3-format file, “we can bring the laptop out [at employee meetings] and play it for the whole staff, and they can hear the emotion, too.”

Papa Murphy’s and the Chas & Chas Melting Pot both use the subscription-based guest feedback services of Salt Lake City-based Mindshare Technologies Inc., just one of several genres of customer-intelligence technologies now being tested or deployed by operators. Among the others:

• In-restaurant hardware and software supporting guest self-surveys, such as that being used at the Grapevine, Texas, branch of nine-unit Cozymel’s Mexican Grill of Dallas, which soon will be added to two others.

• Second-generation Web comment pages at the website of 52-unit Tumbleweed Southwest Grill of Louisville, Ky., www.TellTumbleweed.com , which management said has netted more than 6,000 customer exchanges since January 2007.

• Mass electronic-survey results passed onto operators, including O’Leary of Chas & Chas, by providers of ancillary restaurant technology services. Notable among such service providers is the OpenTable.com online-reservations support group of San Francisco that earlier this year added a diner-feedback tool that already reportedly records more than 200,000 responses monthly.

• Combinations of the tried-and-true e-mail marketing list and restaurant-level software for customer relationship management, or CRM, such as that in use at the 210-seat Corbin & Reynolds restaurant and bar in Long Beach, N.Y.

Kenney of Papa Murphy’s and O’Leary of the Chestnut Hill Melting Pot each indicated that perhaps the single most valuable aspect of the Mindshare technology relates to its ability to distribute in real time via e-mail or Web reports survey findings of interest to various headquarters, field and restaurant-level employees. But they noted that additional functions, such as automated protocols that require restaurant managers to acknowledge problems and report back on fixes and the distribution of recorded customer calls, greatly bolster the impact of research findings.

Kenney said the entire Papa Murphy’s system has used Mind-share’s service and technology for about a year. The restaurants, using cash register receipt or box topper messages, solicit guest input via automated phone interview or website questionnaires. Participants are offered an incentive, such as free Cheesy Bread, cookie dough or a discount on their next purchase.

The Papa Murphy’s Take ‘N’ Bake Pizza chain uses box toppers to solicit feedback from its guests.

The chain previously used a mystery-shopping service, but management wanted more reports per store and viewed guest self-surveys to be a more cost-effective way to reach that target.

“Right now, we’re getting about 60,000 customers a month telling us what they think of our services and products,” Kenney said.

He said the Mindshare system permits his team to change up survey questions quickly and at little or no additional cost. However, he advises users of such services to use the expertise of their service provider fully in shaping questions and to “avoid the danger of focusing too much on the negative” comments.

Mindshare, as do some other feedback services, can e-mail immediate notification, or “alerts,” to the appropriate personnel at client companies based on certain programmed parameters and keywords used by consumers or questionnaire choices they make.

“We’ve had incidents where something is not right, and the store knows about it within 30 minutes and we make it right,” Kenney said.

He observed that “customer recovery,” or the resolving of issues with a guest whose potential lifetime spending with a chain may represent thousands or tens of thousands of dollars, “is a big part [of the appeal] of systems like this.”

Mary Russo is president of Cozymel’s parent, Food, Friends & Company. She said she is looking forward to the alert feature “that saves the guest right now” that will be part of the second-generation of table-mounted payment, marketing and surveying devices from TableTop Media, her company’s technology supplier.

By ALAN  J.  LIDDLE

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Contrary to some operators, Russo doesn’t want Cozymel’s managers to receive e-mail alerts or text messages warning of unhappy guests because she wants their attention always on the floor. Rather, she said, she’s asked Dallas-based TableTop Media to use an on-device colored light or some other means of visual notification that the guests at a particular table need the attention of a manager in short order.

Food, Friends & Company chairman and chief executive Jack Baum holds those same titles at TableTop Media, where he is an investor.

The primary functions of the digital devices being developed and marketed by TableTop Media relate to permitting guests to close out their tabs and swipe their own payment card, as well as the promotion of high-margin add-ons, such as desserts and specialty drinks, and entertainment, such as trailers for movies at nearby theaters. Because the devices result in “faster table turns” and successfully foster double-digit increases in sales of the items they promote, they will soon be upgraded at the chain’s Grapevine unit and added to others in Manhattan Beach, Calif., and Las Vegas, Russo said.

But apart from sales and entertainment functions, the TableTop Media device also surveys guests in many ways, including through a simple request that they rate their dining experience as they wait for payment card transaction approval. After the transaction is complete, guests are asked if they would care to answer a five-question survey.

TableTop Media representatives said 92 percent of the guests swiping their own payment cards at the Grapevine Cozymel’s answer the simple experience-rating question, while 29 percent agree to the five-item questionnaire that, to date, has been solicited without the use of an incentive.

Both Russo of Food, Friends & Company and Kenney of Papa Murphy’s indicated that the guest self-surveying technology tested or used by their chains has been helpful in assessing guest response to new menu items, among other benefits.

O’Leary of the Chestnut Hill Melting Pot said guest feedback provided by Mindshare and diner feedback provided by OpenTable.com are used to address complaints on the fly at the 150-seat restaurant. During Saturday staff meetings, he said, positive comments collected through those venues are shared with the result being that “[we] get people pumped up on the busiest night of the week.”

Corbin & Reynolds restaurant managing partner Andre Lopez said an e-mail and paper surveying system touching guests recently painted a clearer picture of a service challenge that wasn’t readily apparent to managers of the East Coast restaurant.

Customers “told us that the staff was huddling in the corner,” Lopez said of a waitstaff practice that had some guests feeling ignored. “We designed stations in the dining room so that if [servers] had nothing to do, they had a place to stand” closer to the guests in their section, he added of the fix.

Lopez said the restaurant about a year ago launched a “V.I.P. Club” offering participants exclusive discounts and promotional offers to foster greater guest loyalty and frequency. He said about 1,600 people have signed up and pertinent information drawn from their regular e-mail correspondence is loaded into the customer relationship management software provided by OpenTable.com as part of its technology package for supporting real-time online reservations at client restaurants.

Long Beach is a tourist destination, and “we don’t see as many people this year, compared to last, coming into town,” the restaurateur noted. But because of the e-mail program and CRM software from OpenTable, which permits users to keep notes on guests’ likes and dislikes and experiences—good or bad—from visit to visit, Corbin & Reynolds is better able to serve the guests who show up and target and try to increase the visit frequency of customers living within a 10-mile radius, he indicated.

“I think it is huge,” Lopez said of Corbin & Reynolds’ combined use of the e-mail-anchored V.I.P. Club and CRM software.

TellTumbleweed.com has been incorporated into all aspects of Tumbleweed Southwest Grill marketing and advertising, including television commercials. The proprietary feedback routing and tracking technology behind the website, and the staff working with it, send e-mail responses within a day and every customer who provides contact information is contacted by telephone, according to Tumble-weed Restaurants Inc. sources. They said all comments are reviewed by chief operating officer Mike Higgins, all store-level complaints are directed to the appropriate area director and that every comment, positive and negative, is flagged and tracked using keywords for analysis.

“This streamlined process allows us to know how we’re doing [with customers] in real time throughout the entire Tumble-weed system,” Higgins said in a written statement.

Guest self-surveys are a natural extension of the service model used in the restaurants operated in Woodland Hills, Calif., and Hollywood, Calif., by uWink Inc. The “media bistro” concept fielded by Van Nuys, Calif.-based uWink combines a casual-dining menu and tabletop touch screen terminals for guest self-ordering, game playing and entertainment purposes.

Alissa Tappan, uWink vice president of marketing, said on-screen surveys are filled out by 6 percent to 12 percent of the guests dining at a uWink. She said collecting surveys using uWink’s proprietary touch screen, self-service interface is “faster, cheaper and easier than dealing with comment cards,” and added that the real-time nature of that feedback is seen by management as “critical to the success of our business.”