El Pollo Loco finds out with real-time customer response program

STORES Magazine

For Tell Us About Us, a rapid response, customer survey company, there’s nothing quite like a fine whine. It processes volumes of customer complaints (and compliments, too), which then are used by clients like El Pollo Loco, Popeyes Chicken & Biscuits, Dairy Queen and Travel Centers of America to measure their performance.

While a typical consumer survey offers retailers a performance snapshot, Tell Us About Us provides continuous feedback about menu preferences, order accuracy, restaurant cleanliness, customer service and customer loyalty, as well as employee comments. Through its call centers and comment cards, automated telephone and web-based surveys and mystery shoppers, the company is able to make survey results available immediately.

“We’ve found this [survey tool] to be very helpful in providing feedback,” says Karen Eadon, vice president and chief marketing officer for El Pollo Loco, a 320-unit restaurant chain based in Irvine, Calif.

“The survey responses show up in real time, immediately. The store managers and the franchisees get the feedback immediately. A store knows right away if they have done a great job, and [if not] a manager can focus his staff on correcting issues so that a customer doesn’t experience it again,” says Eadon.

Customers are asked to participate in a three-minute telephone or on-line survey, and are offered a $1 discount as an incentive. El Pollo Loco has generated more than 200,000 customer comments since it began using Tell Us About Us in January.

Performance scoreboard

Customer comments “show up as soon as they hang up or log off,” Eadon says. The survey results are recorded on a password-protected website that allows individual restaurant managers, regional managers and senior executives to review the findings they need. “We now have a performance scoreboard to evaluate each of our restaurants and learn where there are opportunities for us to improve,” Eadon says.

Tyler Gompf, president of Winnipeg, Manitoba-based Tell Us About Us, says its surveys are appropriate for just about any high-traffic retailer. “We have a fairly large stronghold in QSR and also with franchise operators and other multi-unit retailers like grocery chains, the travel industry and banking.” The heart of the Tell Us About Us system is its Knowledge Management Console, a software program through which all survey responses are gathered, organized and presented to clients via the web. “We are providing empirical data at the gut level,” Gompf says. Another dimension of its services is the company’s ability to measure the effectiveness of a client’s marketing and promotional programs. “We can put a program together quickly and post the results in real time, on the web. In the past data might have been gathered in a two- or three-month timeframe,” Gompf says.

At El Pollo Loco, Eadon plans to use these surveys on an ongoing basis. “You always need to be in touch with your customer, and we intend to use this kind of feedback mechanism for the foreseeable future,” she says. And with Tell Us About Us being headquartered in Canada, “the rate of exchange benefits us. It’s a great value.”

By Michael Hartnett