Case study: Mitchells & Butlers and Reputation.com


Mitchells & Butlers operates 1,700 restaurants and pubs across the UK, including the brands All Bar One, Browns, Harvester, O’Neill’s and Toby Carvery. Each site could potentially have more than 20 reputation sites (Google, Facebook, TripAdvisor, OpenTable, etc) resulting in more than 30,000 digital sources to monitor and manage. “In 2016 we realised we could not


keep up with the exponential increase in the volume of online reviews. We needed to have everything on one platform,” says Sophie Chadd, M&B’s marketing support manager. The main challenge was to find a solution that could handle the size of the operation and that would be easy to use for all front-line team members. Reputation.com was brought in to:


● Provide customer-facing employees with a way to respond quickly to guest reviews and be aware of their feedback in real time. ● Gain full visibility of their brands’ online reputation by having all third-party review sites displayed in one single dashboard. ● Manage social media more efficiently by disseminating content and assets across the organisation. ●Build reports analysing key business metrics, from customer sentiment to social media engagement.


A user-friendly mobile app displaying dashboards and pie charts is now used by 2,000 employees, from frontline staff up to board executives. Chadd says Reputation.com was welcomed by staff quickly with very little training required. She adds: “We were concerned that managers might divert too much time to responding to guests online instead of interacting with their guests in person, but this has not happened. Monitoring and responding to reviews is now part of their job. Like it or not, this is where the industry is going.” With Reputation.com, response rates rose


from 59% to 83% in the first year, then up to 93% in the second. Mitchells & Butlers chief executive Phil Urban says: “In addition, Reputation.com allows us to gather consumer insight and evolve our brands in line with consumer demands. We have seen the feedback score increase across the estate with Net Promoter Scores increasing hand in hand.”


While believing that social media men-


tions represent a tiny percentage of total foot- fall, Critiquie’s feedback solution, hosted by Amazon, encourages customers to give con- structive criticism or praise easily, quickly and conveniently, with the aim of gathering more representative data. Newman is not alone in her skepticism of social media’s true business value. Last year pub chain JD Wetherspoon caused a stir by closing down all its social media accounts. Chairman Tim Martin said: “We are going


www.thecaterer.com


against conventional wisdom that these plat- forms are a vital component of a successful business. I don't believe that closing these accounts will affect our business whatso- ever.” Indeed, Wetherspoon has continued to trade well since its social media shutdown in April last year.


THE FUTURE Looking to the future, Zoe Koumbouzi at ReviewPro says that AI, automation and increasingly efficient analysis of big data are


enabling the company to make smart opera- tional changes and capex allocations. For end users, ReviewPro’s fourth ver- sion of semantic analysis features engine improvements (20%-30% more mentions detected) and improvements to data analy- sis (advanced filters to segment data). Rep- utation management solutions are moving towards more automation and freeing up staff to provide one-to-one hospitality. And on that final point, perhaps even Tim Martin would approve.


Technology Prospectus 2020 | 57


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