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Southern Rock Restaurants (SRR), a major franchise operator in the GoTo Foods brand portfolio, operates 156 McAlister’s Deli restaurants across thirteen states and is expanding. The sheer volume of reviews SRR receives — over 25,000 a month — and the round-the-clock nature of online guest interactions made maintaining a stellar online reputation, essential in the fiercely competitive hospitality industry, almost impossible for the SRR team to process manually. The team also struggled to consistently post social media content at scale for franchisees to effectively engage with customers on various platforms and networks.

Just one month after launch, SRR was able to respond to 148% more reviews than it had previously. This increase in guest engagement translates directly into enhanced customer satisfaction and loyalty. Timely and meaningful brand responses matter because 94% of consumers use reviews to make local buying decisions.

Uniquely, Genius Reviews helps SRR identify product issues inside of reviews and stay on top of quality control, especially when stores have limited-time offers. The added security measures and spam identification capabilities provide peace of mind, safeguarding the brand’s reputation to ensure they aren’t responding to spam reviews.

SRR also utilizes SOCi Social to address inconsistent social media posting. With a scalable way to post localized content for all franchisees across multiple networks, SRR increased its posting frequency by 900% on Meta in just 90 days, leading to an impressive 48% increase in engaged Facebook page users. By prioritizing customer engagement and efficiency, SRR exemplifies the transformative power of SOCi and SOCi Genius in helping the brand better know and understand its customers and overcome online reputation management challenges.

When businesses respond to customer reviews, 50% of customers report feeling satisfied that the response was helpful and met or exceeded expectations. Implementing SOCi Genius Reviews, SRR has cut its review response time by 55% and achieved an impressive 99% response rate within 24 hours. Spencer was even able to respond to a backlog of over 107,000 historical reviews by herself, amidst her other responsibilities.

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Genius Reviews decreased Ascent HM’s review response time by five days and seven hours, with most now being responded to in 48 hours or less, making the net annual time savings for the brand approximately 1,524 hours of employee time saved per year. Genius Reviews automatically generates customized responses to customer reviews for each location, allowing restaurants to have review responses tailored to their unique guests, ensuring they feel seen and heard. The thousands of employee hours saved are now refocused on other tasks to drive the business forward.

Even large brands have marketing teams that simply cannot respond to every review promptly, with the time and attention to detail customers deserve. Research shows that 94% of consumers use reviews to make local purchasing decisions, but only 50% think brand responses are satisfying. Templated review responses are quickly outdated, repetitive, and boring. They also don’t provide any value back to the business by resolving negative reviews, nor do they aggregate review data. Ascent HM can now analyze shifts in its restaurants’ online reputations over time and be proactive instead of reactive to business inquiries and feedback, capturing more revenue with happier customers.

Since Genius Reviews implementation, Ascent HM has observed that responding to reviews is being recognized by customers, resulting in positive effects on the business. Ascent HM saw a 50.3% increase in positive reviews with Genius, showing that timely, personalized responses do improve customer experience and satisfaction, allowing each location to attract and retain happier customers.

SOCi Results

Since implementing Genius Reviews, Ascent HM has seen remarkable improvements in the company’s online review response rates across both the Perkins and Huddle House brands. The review response rate for all 556 Perkins and Huddle House locations is now 99%, which is a 450% increase from where they began at 18%.

Specifically, comparing the months of September and October of 2022 to September and October of 2023, the brands saw:

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The brand was missing vital customer feedback with no way to properly review or measure customer surveys or sentiment. Lee’s had built a manual, in-house website form which fed into an email-based system generated to the field operations team, who then had to forward emails to the correct people. It was time-consuming and ineffective. A proactive, private feedback strategy to capture happy and unhappy customer feedback to make informed decisions to drive business impact was needed.

To increase franchisee accountability with one central place for surveys and customer feedback, Lee’s Famous Recipe Chicken partnered with SOCi using SOCi Surveys, Social, Reviews, and Listings. SOCi Surveys took what was before a very manual process and streamlined it to proactively capture customer feedback. This process also decreases the number of negative reviews on public review networks, helping the restaurant with its reputation.

Lee’s implemented the SOCi platform, and specifically, SOCi Surveys, to gather all sentiment from inbound and website comments, which has allowed the brand to have a one-stop shop for franchisees and restaurant operators to view and respond to all forms of customer comments.

SOCi Results

SOCi Surveys is a better way for Lee’s Famous Recipe Chicken to deal with customer feedback. In a 30-day period alone, the restaurant has had 296 inbound web surveys across 127 locations.

Sokolik noted that Lee’s Vice President of Operations has begun sending out daily examples of customer survey feedback from stores to the entire company: “Since we’ve started doing that, we’ve seen more engagement. Franchisees get to hear more of the good, and the bad, from leadership. All of our multi-store operators are now using SOCi, which we see as a win.”

Since implementing SOCi surveys, Lee’s has seen a number of positive results, including:

• The ability to communicate with more customers.
• Increased response rate to customer feedback.
• Increased communication and engagement with customers.
• Reduced the amount of time it takes to respond to customer feedback.

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Constant changes in how and when stores could do business impacted customer touchpoints, including point-of-sale systems, the mobile app, listings aggregators, and Olo, WaBa Grill’s online ordering platform and digital payments provider. Managing these changes was labor-intensive, requiring even C-suite involvement in what was essentially an analog task.

WaBa Grill needed to address two primary issues: ensuring the accuracy of customer data and optimizing its online presence.

WaBa Grill recognized that its data from Olo was a main source of truth for its operations, and integrating it with SOCi could provide a comprehensive solution. The team needed to cut through the noise in listings management, improve SEO, respond to reviews, and enhance the user experience by ensuring customers could access the right information effortlessly. Through the integration of Olo and SOCi, WaBa Grill gained a reliable and seamless method to keep customers informed about store hours and locations; updates made within Olo are automatically syndicated to their listings.

That partnership resulted in local page implementation, driving growth to local store pages and WaBa Grill’s store locator page. WaBa Grill’s success with Olo and SOCi showcases the transformative power of combining digital ordering and marketing solutions for the QSR industry. By addressing challenges and adopting technology for changes, WaBa Grill has improved operational efficiency and customer experience, decreased labor costs by reducing errors, and thrived in a rapidly changing digital landscape.

SOCi Results

WaBa Grill saw tangible results since implementing Olo and SOCi with reduced order errors and significantly decreased labor costs, along with the following positive metrics:

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For almost thirty-five years, the iconic Goodcents (formerly known as Mr. Goodcents) has been committed to a culture of fresh food and quick service across the Midwestern United States. At nearly 100 locations, the brand and its franchisees take pride in subs and friendly employee personalities while still being supported by a small corporate team.

Goodcents’s previous marketing platform did not provide the localized marketing service or support the franchise needed. There were incorrect local pages and inconsistencies with listings among other issues that proved it was time to explore a better option.

Goodcents wanted a direct line to a comarketing cloud business partner that could help its internal team be more efficient, provide better marketing services for franchisees, and solve for necessary integrations with other partners.

The Solution

Goodcents found a fix to its local marketing problems in SOCi’s extensive CoMarketing Cloud solutions, including Genius Reviews and integrations with Olo and Punchh.

Utilizing SOCi Listings Advanced, Social, Local Pages, Genius Reviews, and integration partners provides Goodcents one central dashboard to view, plan, and track marketing tactics and data.

Goodcents has long term goals for marketing strategy implementations that SOCi will help them bring to fruition, like a content library available to all franchise partners.

Goodcents utilizes SOCi’s integration with Olo as an online ordering provider through the Goodcents website and app, and Olo’s Rails for third-party ordering systems. Punchh is another integration Goodcents uses within SOCi to offer customer loyalty experience and rewards and an aesthetically pleasing customer interface.

The SOCi Olo and Punchh integrations allow SOCi users to automatically sync SOCi location data, keep business information up-to-date, and gain visibility into Punchh reviews and ratings data all inside the SOCi platform, providing a more holistic view of overall brand perception and performance across all locations.

Goodcents has also embraced SOCi’s new Genius line with Genius Reviews as an early adopter. Before, the small team used review response templates but needed a swap that better fit their stage of growth.

With only one person managing review responses but still wanting to hit a benchmark of responding within a few hours without losing personal touches, Genius Reviews has integrated into the Goodcents workflow instantly allowing for improved efficiency.

Using Genius Reviews feels even more personal than when we were responding to reviews one-on-one because we did not have time for many personalizations and had to copy and paste generic responses. Now our responses are tailored to individual reviews. We are optimistic about using SOCi Genius Reviews and testing out new AI that will benefit our business size and budget.

SOCi Results

With SOCi’s CoMarketing Cloud, Goodcents has been able to better focus its digital marketing efforts for success. Goodcents has seen the following positive metrics as a result of switching to SOCi:

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