Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome to another edition of Give an Ovation the restaurant guest experience podcast. I'm your host, Zach Oates, and each week I chat with industry experts to uncover their strategies and tactics you can use to create a five-star guest experience. This podcast is powered by Ovation, the feedback and operations platform built for multi-unit restaurants. It gets you insights you need to improve without an annoying survey for your guests. Learn more at OvationUpcom. And today we have someone who has really seen an incredible growth. He's the area developer and owner of seven units for Rock and Roll Sushi. He has been there from 16 units. They're now at 75 units. He's been in it, he's been around it, he's been enjoying it. Eric Robinson, welcome to the show man.

Speaker 2: 0:46

Hello, thank you. Thanks for having me. Yeah, we're doing great, things are going good, we're enjoying it and excited to be here today.

Speaker 1: 0:52

Well, I'm really excited and, as you have seen this journey really from the inside, what are some lessons that you would have shared with rock and roll sushi and yourself at 16 units, now that you're all at 75 units?

Speaker 2: 1:07

Yeah, I mean, we've just been like, as you grow and things change, you see what works for you and then sometimes you kind of lose sight of things too. I think one thing that really like put it in perspective for us was coming out of COVID. It was obviously one of the hardest things I think anybody's been through in the restaurant industry. And going through that and being able to say, like, man, the guest experience fell apart during COVID. The guests were on edge, the our staff was on edge and we kind of lost sight of how important it was. We almost became in a mindset of we're being attacked, they're being attacked, everyone's under attack and like, how do we bring that back?

Speaker 2: 1:44

Once we got out of that, we said, man, something's changed in our service and we stopped. I think you just kind of you're battle hardened in a way. You know well, we've got to get back to great guest experiences. We've got to start giving people a reason to come out of the house again and come back into our restaurant, yeah, and to really build that experience and say, what does the experience look like now? How do we make an enjoyable time outside the house again? So that's been a huge focus for us.

Speaker 1: 2:14

And as you're looking at this and as you're thinking about, how do you get people back in and what are you guys focused on? What is basically more important? The retention or the net? New?

Speaker 2: 2:27

Yeah, I mean for sure is the retention, because you can't grow a business if you're not retaining the guest. What we've seen is we do a lot of third party deliveries DoorDash, Uber Eats and we're thankful for that business, but it's not the way that I see the brands growing from the experience that we want to provide. We want people to be excited about dining out, excited about sushi. There's a lot of things that you can make at home. You can make a sandwich at home, but sushi at home is a difficult thing to pull off. So we can deliver it, but it's so much better if you just come in and let us create that experience for you in the restaurant. So we're trying to do everything we can to bring the guests back out of the house and bring the guests to a fun night out, make it a good date night experience or a good office lunch meeting.

Speaker 1: 3:12

And rock and roll sushi. You guys obviously have a really strong brand. It's a loud brand, it's one that you look at it and it's not like your neighborhood sushi shop. Tell me a little bit about the vibe of rock and roll.

Speaker 2: 3:25

Yeah, I mean we're kind of breaking the rules of what your traditional sushi place should be or what it could be. So we're bringing it out. We have music videos playing and we got the music a little louder. We're trying to bring vibrant atmospheres and really create an experience where you come out and say, wow, that was a fun time to go out for dinner and even all the way down to the food is the food fun? And we're doing a lot of just innovative things with bringing that experience together. We have unusual rolls with strawberries on top and avocados and stuff that you wouldn't traditionally see at a standard sushi restaurant.

Speaker 1: 3:58

And the brand too. I mean, like you look at the brand and you're like this is like a fun place with your staff and creating this brand. It goes beyond just a logo and marketing. You really got to infuse that in your people. How do you do that?

Speaker 2: 4:13

I think it's you know. It starts with who you hire and then definitely how you train, spending the time to find the right people that are going to help you build a memorable experience. It's not just a place to order get. The food is hey, we are Sushi Amplify. We are dining out loud, and so we want to just bring that from starting with our servers all the way to our food. What is that experience you get when you come out and how do we fulfill that promise?

Speaker 1: 4:38

Yeah, and I think that's so awesome because we talk about this all the time, about how the guest and the employee experience are inseparably connected. You have to connect the two. But when you look at the guest experience, what do you think some of the most important aspects of guest experience nowadays are?

Speaker 2: 4:54

Yeah, I think so. What we have to remember right out the gate is when people come out to dine with you food makes us happy, like food gives us joy. Your expectation is, when someone comes out, it's like I want to be happy and they kind of put the burden on you. Will you make me happy, can you satisfy my needs? And so you get that line of like this was my intention, and if you don't hit my happiness, I can go sad real fast and so like how are you going to solve for that? But really just letting that be the first thing you know is like they're coming here to be happy, they're coming here to enjoy their experience dining out. So give them that experience. Give them.

Speaker 2: 5:32

I mean, everyone's got a finite amount of money. Where am I going to spend my paycheck? Who am I going to give my money to and what are you going to give me back for it? And I tell my team all the time, whether it's the cocktail we call them rocktails whether it's the rocktail or it's the sushi roll. It's like what are you doing? They're not buying the little bit of alcohol in the glass, they're buying that experience. They're buying the boomerang. They're buying like the hey, do I have something to hold and build on that experience? And do I get the chopsticks? And it's like bringing all those aspects together and saying I've had a I love that philosophy of just how do you leave it.

Speaker 1: 6:13

I'm an Eagle Scout and we always talk about the campground leave it better than you found it right. So, too, with people. How do your guests leave happier than when they came in? And if that's the mentality and if that's the focus of every single employee every single time, then you're going to crush it. Because guess what happens, Eric, when you go to a restaurant and you have a bad experience with a server, you leave that restaurant and you say, oh man, Jim was really rude. No, you say, that restaurant has bad service, that's right. And so I think it's so critical that we remember that.

Speaker 2: 6:46

Absolutely, and you'll see that in your brand. And even what Ovation's up is with is protecting that online appearance. And like, how are you able to solve it when you mess up? Because we're not perfect, we're working with a lot of moving pieces and everyone knows restaurants are not easy, but how do you solve for that? And, by the way, how has Ovation been helpful for you, man? It's given us so much power to really see what are the guests thinking, what are they feeling, and then just being able to communicate with the guests is just like wow, that's so insightful. That's like you have theories and you have thoughts, but it's like now we know, we know what the guest says and we know how to get in contact with them.

Speaker 2: 7:29

When they left us a Google review, we would try to reach out, but there's almost no response Like you could take. Please just let me know. I want to talk to you like ghost ghost town, I think too, because Google is such a public platform. You know it was like well, I don't really want to just be out there. Well, it's one thing to go leave the one star review, but how do you? Um, you don't really have an open discussion on that platform. And then Novation has brought that together.

Speaker 1: 7:57

And is there anything that you've been able to change operationally, Anything that you learned when from using Novation, from hearing from your guests?

Speaker 2: 8:05

Oh, absolutely. I think one of the biggest things was realizing something that we weren't doing right. You know like well, we surely were. We think we're executing the menu item. Why are they complaining about this one menu item all the time, like we've got to change something on that? And we were saying, like there was a for us, specifically fried rice, and it was expected, like some certain industry standards, of like a chicken fried rice is a dinner sized portion, but for us it was just a side is a dinner size portion, but for us it was just a side. And so we started like man, people aren't getting that this is a side, even though, because the industry standard says this is an entree, and we're like we're letting people down even though the price said side, the expectation was still entree. So we've got to solve for that.

Speaker 2: 8:49

And that's something we're like we didn't know that one particular thing was letting so many guests down. We're like why is everyone complaining about this one little thing? But it gave us insight so we can take that information and then let's change it. If we're not acing it to the guest's expectation, we're the problem. We can't say it's the guest's fault. Hey, it says you know. So we're working through that and say, like, what can we do? We want to wow and this product's not doing it.

Speaker 1: 9:13

Things like that, where it's like the guest has these feelings, they have these thoughts. But what happens historically is if you're waiting for an online review, you're not going to get an accurate representation and that complaint is going to seem like a one-off. But when you can get a lot of guests to give you a little bit of information, it paints a much more accurate picture about what's actually happening in the restaurants. Well, I appreciate that and glad that you're seeing value with Ovation. That is. My biggest motivation in the world is just driving value and hoping that people can see that value. But, as I always say, Ovation isn't to make bad restaurants good, it's to make great restaurants better. And the great restaurants they want to create that guest experience. They have that guest first mentality. They're not afraid of hearing what their guests are saying and helping that guest feel heard. And so kudos to you and thank you for doing that. So, besides Ovation, any other tactics that you would use to improve the guest experience?

Speaker 2: 10:13

Yeah, so when we do some leadership reading with our team and we're always looking for a good thing to help us inspire ourselves and renew our energy each day. And then recently we did a group read right at the same time that we launched Ovation and just kind of really worked together with setting the table with Danny Myers and we started like really implementing those five A's awareness, acknowledgement, apology, started like really implementing those five A's awareness, acknowledgement, apology, action and additional generosity to migrate that in or merge that in with our ovation. Like how do we not just hear what the guest is saying, but how do we answer what the guest is saying? How do we make changes and let the guests know that we're caring about this?

Speaker 2: 10:48

This is not just okay, we don't want a one star, are you? Of course not? But how do we earn five stars? Okay, we don't want a one-star, are you? Of course not? Well, how do we earn five stars? And how do we take those sad guests and turn them into happy guests? And how do we write that great final chapter with the guests and get them loyal to our brand, because we want to be loyal to our guests.

Speaker 1: 11:05

I love that because at the end of the day, when you look at the power of a recovered guest, when you do that proper service recovery, our data shows that that guest who is mad and you recover them is worth 24 times the value of the average guest. And this is. We followed 150,000 customers over 18 months to see their patterns of how they shop and where they go to eat and how often they eat there and what is it based on if they're mad or if they're happy or if they're not and so really powerful data that shows. I completely agree with you, eric, about what you said earlier.

Speaker 1: 11:44

It's great to bring in new guests, but there's a lot of things that you can do to retain the guests that you have and that is so much more valuable that that's way easier to do. And not only that, but those are the guests that are going to go out and be your advocates bringing in the new customers. And so you could focus all you want on marketing. But when you focus a lot and when you really focus on the guest experience and that retention and recovery, that naturally produces net new customers coming in because they bring their friends, because they become loyal, raving fans absolutely yeah, for sure as we look to what's next at rock and roll sushi, how do you think about the future of the brand?

Speaker 1: 12:29

what do you think are some of the main focuses that restaurants should be looking at nowadays?

Speaker 2: 12:34

I think just being open and honest with yourself about hey, sometimes it's hard, it's always hard to accept criticism, right, and then when you have a platform like Ovation, I think you've got to be very mindful about how you want to receive this information and be like look, it's not criticism, this is coaching from your guest and saying we want to do more business with you. We've taken the time to tell you what would make us do more business with you. So listen to them and say oh wow, I do care about my business succeeding. I need to know what you're saying and I need to know before you answer with your wallet, because when the sales have already started going down, then you it's too late. You've messed up and digging out of that hole.

Speaker 2: 13:14

Man, I don't know if it seems like it's harder than ever you get that guest back. It's so difficult. They have a lot of options Open to the feedback. I would say you're going to get the feedback and I tell people when they start up with Ovation I'm like you're going to get a lot of feedback. You can't sit there and get negative in your head. It's like this is coaching, this is what you're getting that information.

Speaker 1: 13:38

I love the fact that you just use the word thankful, because this feedback really is a gift and if you treat it that way, it's going to help you and your business and your team and your brand just get better. So love that, eric. Where can people go to find and follow you and Rock and Roll Sushi?

Speaker 2: 13:55

You can follow us on. We have one Instagram page or facebook page for the whole brand and then we have local ones in your town. If there's that, we always know what local events a lot of our locations are doing, like karaoke and some other you know music, bingo and some other things like that are starting to go on locally. But follow the brand rnr sushi on instagram and facebook. You can follow me. I'm not really great with. I got a brand new baby at home and we're just like we're like struggling or we're not sleeping a ton, but we're having a great time.

Speaker 2: 14:26

But, yeah, I'm out there on some social medias.

Speaker 1: 14:29

I know Eric was rocking the Red Bull right before the podcast. I'm like I get it. I've been there with the newborn. Every hour feels like a day when you're on a few hours of sleep, so I really appreciate you coming on, eric, and for being a rock star with guest experience.

Speaker 1: 14:43

Today's ovation goes to you. Thank you for joining us on Give an Ovation, thank you. Thank you very much. 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.