Tattle Puts Feedback on the Rib & Chop House Menu

Rib & Chop House is a chain of 11 casual dining steakhouses across Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and Utah. As with other higher-end casual restaurants, Rib & Chop House depends on repeat business, and that depends on delighting customers at every touchpoint.

However, Rib & Chop House came into the current decade without any real customer data, according to Yaron Goldman, CEO of the Bozeman, Mont.-based Finally Restaurant Group, which owns the Rib & Chop House concept. “We had mystery shops to hold stores accountable to standards, but we had no real guest data.”

Goldman looked to solve that problem as soon as he joined the Finally Restaurant Group in September 2020. Goldman had worked with Tattle at a previous employer, so he quickly engaged the company to provide Rib & Chop House with a customer feedback solution.

“The great thing about Tattle is the consumer insights they give you and the ability to hold your restaurants up to your corporate standards, as well as the ability to reach out to the guest after either positive or negative reviews,” Goldman says. “It gives you the ability to make changes that directly affect the guest experience. “

Tattle’s customer feedback technology platform is built with an open API to collect guest feedback and measure satisfaction across all-digital ordering channels, such as dine-in, take-out, delivery, and drive-thru. Supplemented with artificial intelligence, Tattle recommends the most high-impact operational areas for improvement across restaurant locations to drive the greatest increase in guest satisfaction.

With Tattle, Rib & Chop House patrons receive a detailed survey within an hour of leaving one of the restaurants. Each survey has 20 to 30 questions, though the number and nature of the questions can change. For example, a restaurant can add questions regarding a specific menu item being tested or remove questions if an item is taken off the menu. The surveys ask patrons about their overall dining experience, food choices, menu items, wait staff, etc. Tattle then uses its AI to uncover the issues that, if improved upon, will lead to the greatest increase in guest satisfaction and sales.

Tattle execs worked with Goldman to come up with the menu of questions that would work best for Rib & Chop House.

To incentivize patrons to complete the surveys, Rib & Chop House enters all who complete the survey into regular drawings for $100 gift cards.

Managers of individual locations can use a dashboard to view survey results at any time. They also receive monthly reports that benchmark their results against other locations.

“This motivates the guys on the bottom of the list to see what the results are from the guys at the top and see what they’re missing to move their restaurants forward,” Goldman says. “We also tie their scores to their bonus program, so they know if the scores aren’t where they need to be, they won’t get the financial rewards they thought they had earned.”

In addition to motivating restaurant managers to boost the performance of their locations, Tattle has also helped boost the performance of the entire restaurant chain, according to Goldman. Sales are up 25 percent since the company started using the Tattle solution.

“It also helps us pinpoint where we have issues,” Goldman says. “You can take that information and you can focus on the opportunities to improve guest satisfaction.”

On a five-point scale, customer satisfaction has improved from 3.91 to 4.4 since the restaurant chain started using Tattle.

Rib & Chop House has also changed some ingredients and menu items as a result of Tattle feedback, Goldman adds.

The next step is to start using Tattle for employee satisfaction surveys, Goldman says. 

The Payoff

Since installing Tattle to measure customer feedback, Rib & Chop House has achieved the following results:

• increased sales companywide by 25 percent;
• increased average customer satisfaction from 3.91 to 4.4 on a 5-point scale; and
• increased sales at some individual restaurants by 3 percent when customer satisfaction first exceeds 4.1.