A big help for a multi-location business

Familie Wiesner Gastronomie AG

CASE STUDY

“re:spondelligent is for us a management tool that goes beyond collecting reviews. It gives an overview of each brand and provides insights that help identify patterns and any quality issues in the restaurants.”

Marc Lauper

Teamguide Marketing & Digital Innovation, Familie Wiesner Gastronomie AG

Problem

Managing reviews of 35 restaurants is extremely labourous and time consuming. Review sites are mainly designed for individual restaurants. Handling different platforms for a single location is difficult, but when you manage 35, the effort is multiplied. 

Goal

The goal is threefold. First, reviews are an important touchpoint with guests and should be used as a marketing tool and base for evaluations and optimizations. Second, unburden customer service, save time with automation, and free up valuable resources. Third, lead innovation in gastronomy with new digitalization opportunities and keep pace with technology to meet the needs of the new generation.

Solution & Results

Customer service saves a lot of time without loss of quality. Before re:spondelligent, the team spent approximately 5 hours per day on handling guest feedback. Now, they only need 2 hours. So if the workload was 50%, with re:spondelligent, it became 20%.

Thanks to the integration with Microsoft Power BI, daily and monthly reporting has been automated, which greatly reduced the amount of manual work. Apart from time saving, re:spondelligent allows us to make more out of reviews. As there are many stakeholders involved, filtering options and other features of the app help better process guest feedback.

Key Learnings

Communication with guests

For Familie Wiesner Gastronomie AG (FWG), it is essential to respond to guest reviews individually and personally within 48 hours. Standard responses are not acceptable. Guests expect an answer to their reviews, and it is becoming even more important for Generation Z. They don’t want any personal interaction, everything has to be possible online.

re:spondelligent provides all the necessary tools to respond to guests quickly and efficiently and to provide high-quality individual responses. Since FWG has been using re:spondelligent, their response rate increased to over 98%, and the average response time went down to one day.

Better reviews

Google is the main focus for FWG, as it is extremely important for undecided guests. Google has way more visitors compared to an own homepage, and it has overtaken Tripadvisor in the number of reviews and relevance for guests. The strategic goal of FWG is to maintain a rating of 4.5 or higher on Google for all restaurants. They understand that to get more positive reviews, they need to encourage guests to leave reviews after their visits. The next step would be to use IWantTo.Review for this purpose.

Understanding

Reviews offer an untapped potential for gaining a better understanding of how guests perceive a restaurant and give insights into individual experiences. re:spondelligent helps FWG turn feedback into valuable data. For example, with smart filtering options, food control specialists can get all the information on the subject of food safety. The restaurants can easily see which channel or which topic needs a tweak, and the headquarters have an overview of each brand and can compare the performance over time. 

Conclusion

Reviews have never been as important as now. FWG is still in the process of implementing all the different features available in the app. However, with the time and more intensive use of re:spondelligent, FWG has already noticed progress. They have become faster and more efficient with handling online reviews without losing quality.

“A big plus of re:spondelligent is that everything is in one place: 35 x 5 review platforms. You don’t need to do any individual checks anymore.”

Marc Lauper, Teamguide Marketing & Digital Innovation

Familie Wiesner Gastronomie AG is using a full range of features that re:spondelligent offers today.

1. Review Dashboard

where FWG can monitor all their online reviews published on different platforms across multiple locations. The restaurant managers can easily see the latest reviews and filter by rating to check for negative cases. AI-powered content analysis not only helps see what guests say about certain topics but also measures the performance to create actionable insights, such as what needs improvement.

2. Review Responses

can be written and published right in the app. A combination of AI-powered responses and templates lets FWG respond to guest reviews quickly and individually. 

3. Review statistics

reveal the performance of one single location or the whole brand at a glance. An online popularity index re:Score is used to identify trends and to compare restaurants to each other. 

4. Benchmarking

helps FWG see how the competitors are doing, compare the key metrics, and work on strategies to make their offering even more attractive. 

5. Widgets

FWG believes in showcasing reviews to attract more guests. Therefore, they are using re:spondelligent Widgets on the websites of their restaurants where people can view the menu and book a table right away. 

6. IWantTo.Review

is the solution to collect more online reviews. Smart customizable landing pages can be shared in post-visit communication with guests to encourage them to leave a review.

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About

Familie Wiesner Gastronomie AG (FWG) – a family business that has been operating successfully in German-speaking Switzerland since the 1990s. It belongs to the 20 largest Swiss gastronomy companies. With almost 1’000 employees from around 70 countries, they operate 35 establishments.

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