Next Level Loyalty with Olga Lopategui

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome to another edition of Give an Ovation, the restaurant guest experience podcast, where I talk to industry experts to get their strategies and tactics you can use to create a five-star guest experience. This podcast is sponsored by Ovation, an operations and guest recovery platform for multi-unit restaurants that gives all the answers without annoying guests with all the questions. Learn more at OvationUpcom. Annoying guests with all the questions. Learn more at OvationUpcom. And today I'm so excited to have back on the podcast Olga Lopategi, and she has been had an illustrious career at Yum TGI Fridays and she's now a restaurant marketing consultant. You have probably seen her on LinkedIn. She's a prolific poster, great thought leader, someone that everyone should be following. But, olga, welcome to the podcast.

Speaker 2: 0:51

Thank you. Thank you for the beautiful introduction. I suddenly feel very important.

Speaker 1: 0:55

Well, that's not because of any of my doing. It's because of a life of your doing. So you work with a lot of restaurants, and what are some of the problems that you tend to solve and what type of restaurants do you tend to work with?

Speaker 2: 1:11

So Restaurant Loyalty Specialists is a little boutique consulting firm. So we work with restaurant chains, usually 25 units on the up, and we help those restaurants set up their loyalty programs, optimize their loyalty programs, optimize their loyalty programs, move from one loyalty provider to another and sometimes back. So anything related to um, to loyalty and communications through own channels so um really reachable, directly reachable guests, so we do everything related to that.

Speaker 1: 1:43

And are there any technology? I don't know if you have like favorites. Do you publicly talk around who your favorites are, or do you don't publicly talk about?

Speaker 2: 1:55

it. I try not to. I try not to talk. I can tell you which ones I work with most, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they're favorites and honestly, there are so many good platforms out there on the market these days there are not so many really bad platforms anymore. It used to be, but they kind of fell apart over the years.

Speaker 2: 2:18

So really what we find is a lot of the modern technology can solve restaurants' problems fairly easily, a lot of the modern technology can solve restaurants problems fairly easily, and the key is not to hope that the technology is going to solve it by itself. It's like that magical AI that's going to come in and do everything for you Loyalty programs and communications tools. You still have to do the work. If you do the work, it almost doesn't matter which platform you're on. Oh interesting. Somebody has to do the work.

Speaker 1: 2:44

So, if I am looking to switch, what are some that you think I should keep in mind in the evaluation process?

Speaker 2: 2:54

If you're going to change your loyalty in the communications provider again, it's really really hard to say so for most of my clients, and I tell that to everyone. If a potential client comes in and says, oh, we hate provider X and we would like to change to provider Y, I really need to understand what is it that they hate about provider X? And more often than not it's something about training. It's something about how they've set up, how to use it. They're not using the templates correctly or they're trying to run programs using this provider that are not really optimal for using that particular provider. So most of the time it's easier to change something in the restaurant chains process rather than switch the provider altogether. Sometimes you'll have a technical issue. For example, doesn't integrate well with my point of sale, and then if the data comes in wrong all the time and you've been working at it for a year and it still doesn't populate correctly, you can't trust your dashboard. Yep, in that case you do have to change.

Speaker 2: 3:57

But, if it's not a major integration issue, that is not solvable. So process adjustment usually people are better off sticking with their provider usually and just using them wisely.

Speaker 1: 4:12

That's a great.

Speaker 2: 4:14

No pun intended and wisely.

Speaker 1: 4:17

Yeah, holler at you, noah Glass, well, and Mike. Here's the thing. As we look at, what does this actually mean? I think that we see that very often. I mean we obviously.

Speaker 1: 4:33

I think a lot of people who switch to ovation, for example, from like a long survey, it's more of a fundamental philosophical switch as opposed to a technological switch. And I think that we often see what happens too is that if people leave Ovation because they're like, oh, something's not going well with it and they switch to someone who's trying to be like a Ovation copycat, eventually within a few months they'll come back because they're like, oh well, turns out it wasn't. Like we have a worse product now and turns out it was more about the processes. And we see that too with we switched our CRM from HubSpot to Salesforce and, by the way, four years ago we switched our CRM from Salesforce to HubSpot, right, and what we realized was it was less of switching to HubSpot or switching to Salesforce. It was more of the processes that we had in place and making sure that the data is clean and the processes set up allow for data to remain clean.

Speaker 2: 5:37

Yeah, that's a really, really good example. I use Pipedrive for my CRM. I used to use HubSpot and now I'm maybe switching back to HubSpot. Maybe not, but at the end of the day, if you set up the processes to match, whatever the provider, how the provider intended to use their tool, you're probably going to be in a better place.

Speaker 1: 6:01

Yeah, right, I mean yeah, because I look at it like you know, ovation, right, it's like we've we work with 4,000 restaurants and there's a reason it's working with 4,000 restaurants. If you're a unique situation where it's not working, okay, well, let's figure out why it's not working, because I'd be just as curious as you, because it's working for everyone else. You know, and I think that's a great premise to go about it with any tech partner is how do we make sure that we use it? And I would recommend and honestly, being someone who you know, being someone who works with all these restaurants, I love it when someone says hey, can we do another demo and just get like a reset on what is it that you do? How should we be implementing it? How are we doing a reset on what is it that you do? How should we be implementing it? How are we doing? And we do that at least on a quarterly basis with our customers and, if you're not doing that with your vendors, this is a great time to do it.

Speaker 2: 6:56

Yeah, absolutely so. The onboarding process and the training process is something that a lot of platforms have issues with or sometimes it's not the platforms themselves, sometimes it's the clients, because there is an expectation that you get SAS tool today and you're just supposed to be able to just go in and just run it. And that expectation it may be true for Ovation I don't know because I haven't worked inside Ovation very much but for most sophisticated loyalty and CRM platforms you just cannot expect that. You cannot expect somebody with a marketing degree to just walk in and start deploying perfectly great campaigns off the bat without substantial training. It just doesn't happen because those things are complicated and if they were not complicated, as a client you would complain they don't do a lot of things yeah, and I think like excel.

Speaker 2: 7:50

Right, you know you, anybody can open an excel file, but not anybody can build a model in a half an hour. You gotta have a couple years of training to get there. So it's the same thing, right?

Speaker 1: 8:00

exactly. I think that that's very well said. Um, but one of the big things is that you have such a firm North Star of the guest experience right. All of this boils down to the guests because the restaurant chains work so hard to get access to those guests.

Speaker 2: 8:27

It's very hard to get them to sign up for marketing communications, whichever form of they come in. Once you've got them into the database, you have the opportunity to market to them at a very, very low cost, which is wonderful, because otherwise you'd have to chase them with flyers through the mail or chase them all over the internet somehow with expensive banners and ads and so on. So you have access to them now. Once you have that, don't lose that trust. Make sure that whatever you send them is something that they actually want to open. And it's hard to make it consistently 100%. Every single communication is relevant, but it's becoming more and more possible. So what I try to impart on my clients, my restaurant clients, think about what do your guests want to see, as opposed to what do you want to push on them as much as possible.

Speaker 2: 9:27

I don't know if you need any examples of what that means.

Speaker 1: 9:31

Well, I think that. So actually, one of my companies that I that I started before Ovation, we actually sold it to a social media management company and I developed an algorithm to translate social media data into gift recommendations, but as a byproduct of that, we actually were able to analyze social media data and turn it into relevant topics. So let's look at all of our followers what are they interested in? And let's talk about things that they're. Let's have them tell us with data, what things that they're interested in, and so I think it's an interesting virtuous cycle of if you want to talk to your customers, you know what you first need to do. You know what makes for a great first date, olga Not talking so much, but listening A little bit of listening, right, exactly. And so I think that's a great virtuous cycle of you want a better loyalty, you want better marketing. Listen to what your guests are saying.

Speaker 2: 10:28

Yeah, and with restaurants it's a little bit tricky because restaurants there is not that many things a restaurant can say to the guests, or most restaurants can't say that much to the guests. It is not related to food. In most cases it comes out as not super relevant. So the majority of communication as a restaurant you're going to send out there is going to be about food and beverage. So that's kind of natural. You may have some additional tie-ins here and there, but most of it is going to be about food and beverage. And so then the next question is what's the relevant food and beverage for a certain person? So for me, you get me at seafood Anything seafood-related I'm opening the email. You get me at seafood Anything seafood-related I'm opening the email. Steaks, not so much Dessert depends.

Speaker 2: 11:12

So really, what we need to know about our guests is what types of products do they like? Try to figure it out as quickly as possible. And also, what are general interests related to what you're selling are right. So people with kids send them kids' meals information. People without kids never send them kids' meals information, or send it once a year. So people that never spend more than $10 on lunch do not send them family meals. They will not buy it. Don't bother.

Speaker 2: 11:46

So make it relevant when you think about it from a retail perspective, when you're not in the business itself. I was just talking to somebody who is developing personalization engine for retail purposes and we were talking about how are they going to use it to customize recommendations. So in the context of retail, they're saying, hey well, we have this customer, we have their purchasing history, we can tell what was their favorite color and now we can customize their email to show them the tops, t-shirts or whatever it is, in the colors that they have historically made purchases. And yes, every now and then you're going to throw in purple, but most of the time you're going to do orange and red. Yeah, right, so you can customize it. They never bought a long sleeve t-shirt. You just continue showing them tank tops because that's what they've been buying, that's what they're interested in. So the probability of them continuing to open those emails and if the things they see in there are relevant to their life is substantially higher, and that's how you keep them interested.

Speaker 1: 12:53

Love that. I think that that's so key and so I know we've been. You know that's a good strategy around, like making it relevant to them Any other tactics that you've used to to improve the guest experience just to improve the guest experience, not over messaging.

Speaker 2: 13:11

So definitely, definitely not not over messaging is really important, but it's surprising how difficult it is to make sure that people are not receiving too much communication. So keeping keeping track of that and, you know, since we're talking on the Ovation podcast, making sure that we are aware of the guest experience if they have left feedback, is really really important. Because, yes, there are sequences with which you target and retarget those guests that left feedback and you make sure they have been listened to. It's surprising how difficult it is to actually accommodate that information and transfer it into the main database and then segment on it, because it's not a very transparent thing to do. So you don't want for someone who just left a complaint about the brand to receive an email about how great, whatever the new product is the next day. You want to let them stew and recover a little bit before bombarding them with how wonderful we are.

Speaker 1: 14:13

Yeah right. Seems a little disingenuous right.

Speaker 2: 14:17

Yes, but executing on that is actually surprisingly for brands that don't have a CDP. That aggregates all the information from a solution like Ovation and from their loyalty program and from other sources let's say feedback left on Facebook or Google. So if you don't have something, it allows you to pull it all into one place and then target from there. And let's say exclusion anybody leaving negative feedback will exclude from marketing communications for a week. That is surprisingly hard to pull off. Interesting.

Speaker 1: 14:54

Well, yeah, there's some great partners that we have that allow us to push and pull data and when that happens, we can create new tags with that and then even let them know. Hey, this guest not only had a negative experience, but had a great recovery experience.

Speaker 1: 15:13

And we found that those guests who are unhappy and then they're recovered they're worth over 32 times what an average guest is worth. When you look at the the, how much they spend, their recency, frequency spend, you look at their propensity to leave reviews, the uh interception of that negative review, so that is like huge opportunity to do just that yeah, they turn.

Speaker 2: 15:37

They turn into brand advocates, but you know, just playing off of what you just said. So I think it's wonderful that you have all the data flowing into client databases where it can be used for other marketing communications outside. Just the Avation Exchange itself has to put together internal processes that allow for accommodation of this data that you guys are pushing in there into the rest of their marketing strategy, and that's the piece that we often see not happening, because guest feedback is the responsibility of one team and the guest communications is the responsibility of another team. And aligning those processes so that there are appropriate exclusions or doubling up on messaging to certain types of guests based on their feedback, that doesn't happen very often because nobody has time to wrap their head around it. It's a project that needs to happen, but it often falls to the wayside, and that's the kind of stuff that will help us. Just how do you take all the data, that customer data that comes in, and make sure that it's actually smartly utilized?

Speaker 1: 16:53

And what's more, I think, is then taking that into the operation standpoint of you could have the best, and we've all seen this. We've all experienced it both in the restaurant and as a customer, where there's some LTO, but guess what? The people weren't ready for it, they weren't trained properly, there wasn't the right notice for it, it got the posters the day after the LTO went live. The training happened, the shift that it went on, the GM wasn't there for it. All these things happen. The beautiful thing about restaurants is when you start with the end in mind, and I'm reading this great book recommended by second name drop to Noah Glass. He recommended this book called Working Backwards and it's all about how Amazon became Amazon, and the whole concept is you start with the guest experience and you work backwards from there, and if you start anywhere else along the line, you're going to miss the end point, right?

Speaker 2: 17:57

Yeah, I completely agree with that, and it's hard to keep guest experience front and center because there are revenue targets, there are margin targets, there's all of those things that are more immediate. But at the end of the day, if the guests don't have a great experience with the brand, you probably don't have a brand that's going to last a long time.

Speaker 1: 18:19

Yeah, because there's a two to four month revenue lag from guest experience and if you don't create that great guest experience, like you said, all the other stuff is kind of irrelevant, right. All the other stuff is kind of irrelevant, right. So any last piece of advice that you give to restaurants who are looking at their marketing CRM, loyalty programs.

Speaker 2: 18:40

A lot of piece of advice. So one piece that I'm currently working on is we're looking at helping automate lapsed user journeys, bringing lapsed guests back, and that applies both to guests that have had negative experiences and reported them, both to guests that have had negative experiences and reported them, or guests that may have had negative experiences and just went into the void and never said anything to the brand. So we're working on an interesting project on how to best get those guests to come back using first-party communications. We're discovering that return on investment there is just absolutely, absolutely amazing. So you're looking at 10x, 20x, 40x. So I'm starting to realize that a lot of restaurant brands are doing very little in that space, and that's something that I recommend for everyone to look at very closely making sure that guests that are in the database are targeted appropriately, especially if they have labs.

Speaker 1: 19:39

Amen, love that and Olga, anyone in the restaurant industry that we should be following who deserves an ovation.

Speaker 2: 19:46

Who deserves an ovation? I didn't prepare my homework on that. I was like I noticed the question as I was looking at the notes who deserves an ovation? You know I'd like to give an ovation to my client, smoky Moles. I don't know if you're familiar with that brand. It's a Texas barbecue joint that has about 20-something locations between 20 and 30 locations here in the Austin area and they have done a fantastic job with launching their loyalty program and with the rebranding. They've taken a fairly antique image and turned it into a very, very contemporary, very, very sharp new look and feel. And it shows because everywhere I go in the neighborhood people say, oh yeah, we love Smokey Moe's, so shout out to Leslie Smith who is running their marketing.

Speaker 1: 20:49

Yeah, and you know Smokey Moe's they're I don't know if you were aware of this they're an ovation customer and doing some incredible things and when you look at their the guest sentiment, the internal guest sentiment they're about 8% higher than the average guest, than the average restaurant, and a very high, you know, response rate, saving a lot of customers. I mean they're they're doing a great job on the Ovation platform and, um, the thing that, the thing that's great about that, is the Ovation platform. If you're doing well on the Ovation platform, that means that you're doing incredible online and publicly, because we're collecting everyone who also didn't have a good experience and, um, still so much, so much love group there. So, yeah, love Smokey Mo's, incredible team, incredible product, great service and their customers love them. So I think that's awesome.

Speaker 2: 21:40

I forgot that you guys are working with Smokey Mo's as well. So, as I was saying, hold on, aren't they on Ovation? Yeah, that was an unintended tie-in, but yeah, so they are the brand to watch.

Speaker 1: 21:54

Yes, absolutely. I couldn't agree with you more Olga. Well, where can people go to learn more? They listen to this podcast. They love you, olga. Where can they go to learn more about you and get in touch?

Speaker 2: 22:08

Restaurantloyaltiespecialistscom. I know it's a mouthful, but at least it's relatively easy to remember. And then you can always look me up um on linkedin I'm very active there olga lopategia, olga berkovich lopategia.

Speaker 1: 22:21

there's only one, so I'm very easy to find awesome well, olga, for giving us not just one episode, but but let's call it not just one, but two two scoops of your Sunday of data wisdom. Today's ovation goes to you. Thank you for joining us and giving an ovation. Ogromne spasibo Duze diakou.

Speaker 2: 22:41

Te bieram o spasibo.

Speaker 1: 22:43

Thanks for joining us today. If you liked this episode, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite place to listen. We're all about feedback here. Again, this episode was sponsored by Ovation, a two-question, sms-based actionable guest feedback platform built for multi-unit restaurants. If you'd like to learn how we can help you measure and create a better guest experience, visit us at OvationUpcom.