SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Welcome to another edition of Give and Ovation, the Restaurant Guest Experience Podcast. I'm your host, Zach Oates, and each week I get to chat with an industry expert to uncover their strategies and tactics to help you create a five-star guest experience. This podcast is powered by Ovation, the feedback and operations platform built for multi-unit restaurants. Learn what is actually happening in your restaurants and exactly how to improve while driving revenue. Learn more at ovationup.com. And today I'm joined by my good buddy Brock Weeks, CEO of Savvy. What's up, Brock? All right, Zach. Thanks for having me on, man. Finally, do you know what? This is kind of funny. We were talking about this before the show. This is like the third time that Brock and I have tried to record this podcast, but every time we get on to record it, we just start talking. And then all of a sudden it's like, okay, well, now we only have five minutes to record, so let's rebook. And here we are, finally there. And only because we only talk for 15 minutes of our 30 minutes that we have booked. So we're doing a power podcast today. Brock, talk to us about Savvy. What is Savvy?

SPEAKER_01: 1:05

Yeah, I was loud at your intro. I was like, oh, it's kind of there's a reason why we uh work so well together, very aligned there. Savvy, we just believe that the answers to most of the questions that operators have are found within the four walls of the restaurant. It's just really hard to get to the root cause of what's going on, right? There's great tools like ovation that are giving you that pulse check. We want to help give you the leading indicators of what's going on by establishing baselines of the guest experience using tools that are already in place, which is your surveillance cameras. Most people have bought those as put them in as an insurance policy. But with AI and cloud computing, you're able to start to structure all of that data to actually gather baselines of what secret shoppers would do, but all the time, every single guest experience. How long does your actual experience with a guest take to go through your order process, interact with your guest? How long does it take them to actually engage with your guest and be greeted? Because as you look at, you know this better than me, most negative reviews that prevent guests from coming and visiting these stores has nothing to do with the quality of the food. A lot of it is the guest experience. And when we analyzed it, most of it was actually around the speed and consistency of the service, right? Cleanliness of the restaurant, order accuracy, things of those nature that now with AI, those surveillance video clips can actually be structured to give you baselines and understand context to all of that.

SPEAKER_00: 2:29

I love that because you have to know what's going on in your restaurants. You have to know the experience that people are having. One of the things I love about Savvy is that you focus so much on the in-store experience and like seeing exactly what's happening. And while ovation does capture a lot of that feedback in-store, primarily the biggest use is off-prem, where people can understand what's happening once they leave the store. And you combine these two things together and you get a complete picture in-store, off-prem of what the guest is experiencing. And I love to your point about that consistency because if you aren't consistent, you lose the trust of the guest. And the reason that you're in business is because you have good food. Your food has passed the threshold of owning two or three locations. So when you're in like 50, 60 locations, what's it about? Consistency.

SPEAKER_01: 3:24

Yeah. Someone uh forgot, I think it might have actually been Leon from Dave's Hot Chicken at FS Tech, um, or maybe it was Richard from Bojangles. One of the two talking about this exact thing said, you know, it's not so much about the speed. Yes, speed is important, but it's just what is the consistent experience? Like with certain brands, you'll get in that long line that you know is going to take you 15 minutes because you know it's gonna take you 15 minutes. But if it's like a gamble and you're unsure, you're like, I don't know what to expect there, you don't engage. Really, really fascinating. And our data from drive-offs and walkouts and things like that actually shows the same thing. As long as it's a consistent experience and the guest knows what they're getting into, they're choosing to engage with it.

SPEAKER_00: 4:05

So yeah, I think that consistency is trust. And the only way that you can figure out are you being consistent is either by being everywhere at once or leveraging tools that'll summarize everything at once. And I think that's it. Those are the only two options you have. And I think that that's one of the things I love about what you're doing. Now, you work with a lot of restaurants and a lot of locations. I mean, I don't know, do you guys publish how many rooftops you're on?

SPEAKER_01: 4:32

We current count's not published. We should probably end the year contracted in circa nine to ten.

SPEAKER_00: 4:39

That's a big chunk of rooftops. And so you're able to see a lot. And what are you seeing as being the most important aspect? We're talking about consistency, the most important aspect of guest experience. But what does that really mean? What is your data showing about consistency?

SPEAKER_01: 4:55

Yeah, one of those it was interesting. We were doing uh proof of concept, right? Because a lot of folks have been talking about AI, right? And a lot of brands have recognized that vision-based AI has the opportunity to unlock a lot of insights. But a lot of pilots kind of fell in that, not fortunately, not with us, but just generally AI pilots have struggled to get off the ground, not just in the restaurant industry. I think MIT and Harvard published that between 70 to 90% of them never actually make it to fruition. And there's this how do you connect what the model can actually do, the insight it can grab, to an operational workflow, right? Because those are two very, very different things. The tech can work, but if it doesn't work for your team and a workflow, you're kind of just wasting your money. So I give you that context to say what we're seeing around consistency. This one brand, there's all of these different data points we could gather. What we found for this specific brand, it was pizza chain. It was time to engage, was actually like one of the key metrics. Because we've all had the experience where you walk in, right, and you get a shout from the back. Well, people, yeah, leave me in a moment, right? And you're like, oh, and then you stand there, right? And no one comes. And after a couple of minutes, right, we've started to see that once it gets to a if you wait more than a minute and a half to two minutes, that's when the walkouts start to happen. So that's lost revenue. Just take your average ticket value, multiply that by how often what percentage of sales that's happening, and we're able to start to actually quantify that because it's interesting with these brands. So around that time to engage, we go in and we ask, and we're like, okay, this is a key metric that's driving all these negative reviews. You're spending so much money to get guests in the door. And then what's like the first thing that happens with them, right? Is the cleanliness of the restaurant and how quick a get they're engaged with one of your employees. Those are like the two first things. And we constantly ask, well, how do you measure that? And a lot of times the answer is like, uh, right, we're tracking speed of service through the point of sale or through a loop system in the drive-thru. And it's like, okay, well, what about the other 30 to 60 percent of your guests, depending on what percent are happening on-prem? And you actually look at reviews and there'll be customers, it'll be like, ah, you can tell they're measuring how well they take care of guests in the drive-thru, because that's where all the focus is at, right? And these other guests are neglected and they start to walk out. How in the world is a multi-site district manager or above store management team supposed to know? Because in your reviews, no one takes the time to detail that out. I walked in, I waited two and a half minutes, and all I got was a shout from the back, right? Most people don't. They just say it was never greeted and taken care of or something to that nature, right? So that what we're seeing when you can actually measure it and establish a baseline, it's nothing new. We all know whatever is measured is managed, and whatever is managed is improved. You can finally actually start to measure these things. The AI models can look at a dining room, make sure there's no spills on the floor, there's no the trash isn't overflowing, that the tables aren't full of junk and left trash. All of these things that actually matter and affect the guest experience. I mean, if you're only able to check that once a month with a secret shopper or the one time a week, maybe that a district manager can get out there, AI can now just measure that pulse every few minutes, every hour, depending on the cadence they want to do it, but start to establish baselines so you even know what that experience is. And it's been fascinating as we've gone in and seen the expectation versus the reality is typically quite a chasm, but how quickly they can close that chasm now that they have the data, because the people that work, like store managers, shift leads, district managers, like probably some of the hardest working people in America, right? That are running these routes, all that they're managing, dude, they want to do an unreal job, right? They want to continue to do well. You just need to give them the data and a workable workflow that they can actually do something with it.

SPEAKER_00: 8:53

And that's the whole thing that we talk about. No matter what we're talking about, what it really boils down to are the frontline workers. Everything that we're talking about, from obviously one of the things that we both care a lot about with our businesses and looking at it two different ways is the guest experience, right? You're this persistent secret shopper and we're a guest connection platform. And those two things combined, it's not like we're here to try to replace frontline workers, but we're here to Tony Stark them. We're here to give them the Iron Man suit to allow them to do their job. And when you empower your frontline people to both know what they should do to improve and connect with the guest when they don't, that actually increases retention, increases guest satisfaction because people want to feel like they're making a difference. And if you could help them understand what to do to make that difference and make it easy for them, then they'll love you for it. And I think at the end of the day, I love what you're talking about. There's some of the hardest working people in America because the other thing is uh they're working so hard and they're not playing for equity, they're not playing for keeps. Why are they doing this? They're doing it because they want to have a job and they want to make people happy. So, how can we do that better? And and I love that this this concept of technology enabling them to do that. Are are there anything that you've seen? I love that example of like time to greet. Are there any other tactics that you've seen that have improved the guest experience?

SPEAKER_01: 10:25

So we've been late, as you talk about, right, amplifying the human element. I'm laughing when you said that because I have a presentation pulled up on my computer that I'm giving at a brand conference next week. And it's a picture of Tony Stark, right, with Jarvis. Oh, no way. Yeah, it's all of the data basically showing him exactly what he should be doing. But think about all of the mundane, repetitive tasks that have to be completed and are essential, right? We talked about cleanliness, things of that nature, right? Making sure the restaurant is ready for the day. And there's these compliance checklists and they go through with the iPad, and those are great tools, right? But like that is just brain suck work. It's not actually like a human shouldn't be doing some of these things. And historically, we've been feeding them all of this data. Here's your guest review score, here's even your speed of service score, here's your loss prevention metrics, here's right. And it's all of this data that's just thrown at them. And we're saying, hey, we know you're busy, and we know you're not a financial analyst that wants to stare at spreadsheets and data numbers all day long, right? And charts and graphs. But that's what we're kind of all asking them to do. And we're all saying, oh, by the way, you need to log into our platform. And so you're gonna have 12 of these, you got to log into a day like really talk about embedding into workflows. Are we actually making their job easier and amplifying them? Or are we requiring them to do more work? And so our whole focus to get to this consistency and things that we're learning is how do you take those data points and instead of telling them to try to go find something and figure out how to fix it, we're trying to bridge that gap to them to show them the consistent metrics and correlate it, right? That's why we integrate with partnerships and things like you, because you can say, here's a negative review, this experience, and you've heard it a couple times. You would then in our system, right, because of the integration, you just click right on that order ID and go right to the experience and watch and see exactly what the team was doing. Because typically the review is the lagging indicator, the service breakdown is the leading indicator. When you can marry those together and you're basically just telling the manager, this is exactly what happened, and here's the result. Just click right here and go watch the root cause. And then they can go take action, right? They're just reviewing what the data has told them to do and doing what only humans can uniquely do, which is coach and train, right? And help improve. Machines don't do that and they can't do that. So I think it's behooven upon us as tech companies to really understand the life that a store manager and a district manager is living on a day-to-day basis, and how do we make our systems operate for them in that Jarvis type workflow that just tells them what they need to review and approve to take action versus overlowing them with data. Like if we're trying to tell them to do more than three to four things, it's not gonna work, it's gonna fail.

SPEAKER_00: 13:26

Yeah, I totally agree, which is why you know, one of the things that we always focus on innovation is like, let's give the GMs one goal, one thing to focus on, and have them focus on that one thing really, really well and track the improvement of that over time. And we track the improvement based on how the guest experience has been, and you're tracking the improvement based on what's happening in the stores. And so, like, I feel like there's a beautiful marriage here. But what I would love to do though is obviously I see you at a lot of trade shows, you know a lot of people. Who is someone that deserves an ovation in the restaurant industry?

SPEAKER_01: 14:00

Oh man, that's there is so many. I'm gonna use a couple. One actually Tyler Marfs at Scooter's Coffee. Yeah. Talk about a guy that won their team, dude, how hardworking they are, what they're doing, and the growth and all of that. But every time we meet with them, it's a true partnership, right? We've all had those companies we're fortunate to work with, but it's almost kind of just like a let's check in every once in a while, status quo is good, where he's like, Look, how can we improve? How can we be better to work with? Help me understand how we could utilize your tech better. And everything is around how they can make the tools that they've chosen easier, better to use, more affordable for the franchisee, right? Consolidating vendors, things of that nature, just relentless in that pursuit of like, we'll hit the goal. And then it's like, okay, great. Now how else can we improve? Right? Like there's no stopping. He's one, one that we actually don't work with, but um, I know you guys work with him, but shout out to the genuineness of the hospitality industry is uh Jim Biddocks at Dave's Hot Chicken. It's not hard to tell and do the correlation why that brand has done so well. Everyone I've been able to interact with at different conferences and shows, they're genuine in the fact of like take time to come say hello, take time to come connect, ask questions about you, right? Like, and you I just sit and observe and watch, right? And it's fascinating to watch a guy who's leading a brand, right, that just sold for a billion dollars. But you watch the amount of time he takes to go engage with people and spend time on the road for the brand and with his team and highlighting his team. Just super impressed by it. There's so many I could just keep, but those are two that stand out.

SPEAKER_00: 15:42

Love that. Well, Brock, always appreciate you hanging out, whether or not we actually hit record. But where can people go to find and follow you and savvy?

SPEAKER_01: 15:51

Yeah, uh, get savvy.com and it's S A V I. We're on LinkedIn. Pretty fair, try to be active on there. And then we're at the different trade shows. We'll be at Create coming up this weekend, RFDC that's coming up in the next little bit, and a few others. So look forward to connecting with you. Please reach out.

SPEAKER_00: 16:07

Awesome. Well, Brock, for showing us how to be the eye in the sky without the creepiness. Today's ovation goes to you. Thank you for joining us on Givenovation. Oh, that's gonna be our new tagline. Without the creepiness.

SPEAKER_01: 16:18

Yeah, without the creepiness. I love it, dude. I love it.

SPEAKER_00: 16:22

Thanks for joining us today. If you like 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 ovationup.com.