The Happy Customer Index leverages proprietary data from Merchant Centric to understand which restaurant brands are checking all of the customer satisfaction boxes — from timeliness and cleanliness to price/value to staff demeanor. This data is pulled from millions of ratings, reviews and comments across sites such as Google, TripAdvisor and others.
For our index, we have taken a deeper look at three key themes — food, price/value and loyalty/referral — to determine the strongest casual dining brands related to these themes. Merchant Centric calls this measure a brand’s Theme Performance Score (TPS). If the TPS for a brand on a theme is higher than one, it indicates that guests mention the brand positively more often than negatively; for instance, a score of 3.5 indicates that guests mentioned that theme positively 3.5 times more than it was mentioned negatively. Conversely, a score of 0.5 indicates the theme is mentioned positively half as much as it is negatively.
Established brands are defined as having more than 20 locations. Per this TPS ratings system, here are the strongest established casual dining brands, as measured from February 2022 through January 2023.
Click through the gallery to see the top 10 established casual dining restaurant chains.