Background

Mitchells & Butlers is a leading restaurant and pub company in the UK, with over 1,600 restaurants, pubs and bars. Find out how they took control of their online reputation.

You already know Mitchells & Butlers, even if you don’t realise it! That’s because they run many of the UK’s most famous restaurant and pub brands, including All Bar One, Toby Carvery, Harvester and Browns, as well as some of its most beautiful and iconic pubs.

They have been at the forefront of the industry since 1898, and this extraordinary depth of experience has helped them become a highly successful company within the UK’s eating and drinking out market.

• Annual sales are close to £2 billion
• Over 44,000 employees
• In business for 119 years
• Serve around 140 million meals a year
• As well as some 430 million drinks

The Challenge:

Hyper Local Marketing

Marketing is moving to thousands of points of presence. A single group with several brands like Mitchells & Butlers have over a thousand locations spread across the country. Each pub, restaurant or bar can have potentially over twenty ‘reputation sites’ (Google, Facebook, TripAdvisor, OpenTable, etc.) — resulting in over thirty thousand points of presence to monitor and manage.

In 2016, the business had a strong desire to gain greater insight from the volume of reviews received, but this was extremely complex to manage for 1,600+ locations. Mitchells & Butlers could not get overall visibility of their online reputation, and more importantly did not have the ability to respond to reviews or social comments in a timely manner.

This was recognised as a major risk by the business.

Mitchells & Butlers main challenge when searching for an Online Reputation Management solution was to have all third-party reviews showing in one platform. They were looking for a solution that could easily handle the size of their organisation and a platform which was easy to use, to efficiently implement the training of all front-line team members.

“We came to the realisation that we could not keep up with the exponential increase of online reviews volume. We needed to have everything in one platform.”

∼ Sophie Chadd, Marketing Support Manager

The Solution:

One Complete Online Reputation Management Platform

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.

“The most important aspect of the product for us is the review module; first to be able to respond to third-party reviews in one place, and to be able to draw down insight and trend analysis from our guest feedback.”

The Solution:

Easy-to-use application for all levels of the organisation

Reputation.com was welcomed by front-line managers thanks to its user-friendly mobile application. “They download the app and get it right away” – no training headache to deal with.

Mitchells & Butlers has more than 2,000 users in the platform. Staff at all levels of the organisation are involved with Reputation.com:

• All General Managers, their assistants and kitchen assistants: Guest-facing employees use the mobile application as part of their daily work routine; reading and responding to guest reviews and social comments in real time.
• Operational Managers: Regional and district management teams can monitor trends. Using the application they can check for potential issues but also praise best performing locations. Thanks to customised reports, they can review analytics and publish key metrics across the business.
• Marketers: The marketing team analyses customer sentiment to identify key themes at brand levels. The team also uses the platform for social posting and sharing brand content.
• Directors: Senior management receives weekly reporting at brand and location levels for operational insights.

“The company directors are also set up on our platform and regularly receive scheduled reports on activities and statistics.”

The Results: 660% increase in review response

“The business has really taken to the Reputation Score.”

The Results:

Deep Dive in Customer Sentiment

With the Reputation.com platform, Mitchells & Butlers have access to key metrics such as data analytics, customer sentiment, industry benchmarks and location / brand performance. Trends are extracted to find underlying issues, but also to identify key themes at all levels of the organisation.

Improved Customer Experience

Restaurant, pub or bar managers are now engaging with their guests online in near real-time using the mobile application. They can reply much quicker but most of all identify possible changes to improve customer service quickly.

“When we started using Reputation.com 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 materialised. Monitoring and responding to reviews is now part of their job. Like it or not, this is where the industry is going”, said Sophie Chadd.

Operational insights enable all levels of the organisation to make continuous improvements to customer service and stay ahead of the competition.

“We talk more to our guests about their experience; managers get much more exposure to their feedback too.”

Testimonial:

Phil Urban, CEO, Mitchells & Butlers:

2018

“Our focus on online interaction with guests continues with their increasing use of our digital platforms, such as apps and online feedback. Last year we introduced reputation.com – a feedback consolidation tool which enables managers to respond to comments from multiple sources through one system. Through this tool we now respond to 93% of all online feedback and we continue to see the benefits of the personal interaction this platform enables for the guest.”

“In addition, it allows us to gather consumer insight to evolve our brands in line with consumer demands. Since the year end we have increased the average feedback score across the estate to 4 out of 5 reflecting the hard work undertaken in this area.” ²

2017

“The growth of social media has made online reputation more important than ever and we have made significant progress in this area over the course of the year.”

“Using Reputation.com, an online feedback consolidation tool, managers are now responding to 83% of the growing number of online comments, up from 59% a year ago.”

“As managers have increased their level of engagement with their guests, we have also seen average feedback scores increase over the course of the year with total Net Promoter Scores increasing hand in hand.” ¹

¹ Annual Report and Accounts 2017

² Annual Report and Accounts 2018

For more information on how you can improve your online Reputation Score, please contact us at Reputation.com.