In this video interview, Wednesday Seven owner Maura Feingold details her strategy to improve customer satisfaction across the leading restaurant brands in her marketing agency’s portfolio.

Figuring out how to improve customer satisfaction can make or break the future for restaurants and retailers. With more satisfied customers, brands see more referrals, more frequent visits, higher average check sizes — everything required for long-term success.

In this video interview, Wednesday Seven owner Maura Feingold explains exactly how she uses feedback to delight customers and ensure a top-notch experience at every visit. Watch to learn specific ways that leading brands like Tomatina have transformed feedback and VIP marketing into sales-creating assets.

First-hand strategies to improve customer satisfaction

As we’ve seen, Tomatina has set a new standard for brands that want to effectively use technologies like net promoter to their advantage. To quote Tomatina’s COO, Mark Nicandri: There’s a lot of data out there — you can’t be in every restaurant all the time. What I try to do is see all the comments and feedback that comes in. One of the advantages for a multi-unit restaurant is you can look at things side by side. We can look at a comment here and say oh here’s a complaint we had about this dish here, and we had another complaint about the same dish on another side of the bay — perhaps there’s something wrong with the supply we’re getting in. You can look at turnover rate — do we have new servers or a lot of servers who have been there a while? You have to use operational data and contextual information to understand what’s happening and what’s driving change in performance. That’s exactly why we wanted to sit down with Maura Feingold.

In addition to Tomatina, she implements marketing strategies for leading brands across the country, including Outside Lands, Proposition Chicken, Ritz Carlton, and Straw. We wanted to hear exactly how she improves customer satisfaction and uses metrics like NPS to not only measure customer happiness but also gauge which employees need additional training.

Here’s what we found out.

For those more reading-inclined, here are three crucially important takeaways from Maura’s interview:

• Quote: One of the things that we really hang out hat on is the importance of personalizing a customer’s experience.
• Takeaway: Remember, marketing segmentation doesn’t cut it, brands have to execute personalization to see success converting sales from modern customers. To get started with making marketing communication more personal, brands have to build proprietary data.

• Quote: It was incredibly helpful to have an account manager advise us on how to convert more customers.
• Takeaway: Marketing is hard; that’s why it’s so important to take marketing advice from trusted partners when you can. Put it this way — just like restaurants and retail brands are experts in their respective foods and products, trusted marketing technology companies are experts in marketing.  By combining both perspectives, customer communication and messaging will be both on-brand AND in line with best practices from across industries.

• Quote: If one particular restaurant has a lower NPS, I can use that information to make operational decisions.
• Takeaway: NPS Score, the famed “ultimate question,” is an incredibly valuable tool for multi-location businesses. On one hand, a good net promoter score strongly correlates with higher sales — businesses with the highest NPS outgrow their competitors by 2x. On the other, NPS serves as an ideal standard metric to compare performance across locations. Given that individual location, sales vary wildly within a single brand portfolio — on average sales at the best location will be 256% higher than sales at the worst — brands should absolutely use metrics like NPS to evaluate location performance and see which improvements will improve customer satisfaction.