Restaurant Review - Mobile survey system provides real-time feedback on dining experience

Shoeless Joe’s Limited has achieved explosive growth since its start in 1985. It has established a proven formula for success, currently with 40 locations in Ontario and plans to continue to implement an aggressive expansion strategy.

To optimize sales, Shoeless Joe’s needed to expand into new markets and reinvent itself as a sports-themed casual dining restaurant with a bar element. As a result, the restaurant chain set out to open eight locations in 2009 and an additional 10 to 15 restaurants in 2010. To achieve this aggressive expansion strategy in a tough and competitive market, Shoeless Joe’s worked with Pitney Bowes Software (PBS) to acquire the insight needed to accurately position Shoeless Joe’s restaurants based on market and consumer trends.

Shoeless Joe’s was the first company in Canada to implement FACES (Faster, Accurate, Current Economical Surveys), a new mobile consumer survey system, provided by LandPoint Systems Inc. FACES enables Shoeless Joe’s to collect customer data at the point of experience, such as while patrons are awaiting their bill.

Traditionally, restaurants have relied on the time consuming and challenging process of using pen and paper to conduct customer surveys. FACES is fast, easy and less intrusive than previous surveys. The system provides a more professional method for surveying customers and makes the experience more interactive and fun both for the surveyor and for diners.

Offered through LandPoint’s Know Your Faces division, FACES provides restaurant and retail companies with customizable surveys to help them capture customer data more quickly and readily utilizing digital technology—electronic handheld devices such as PDAs or Smartphones. Equipped with customized FACES consumer survey software and PBS location intelligence solutions, FACES helps Shoeless Joe’s address the industry-wide issue of capturing consumer data by making it a more accessible, efficient process.

With FACES, Shoeless Joe’s can routinely make adjustments to its survey questions, enabling the company to keep its target customer profile up-to-date and readily available when making important decisions, such as where to open a new restaurant or where toad in local marketing efforts. PBS enables FACES to geocode the customer’s point of origin using a Canadian postcode or point on a map, drill down to the neighborhood level and generate an in-depth customer profile based on lifestyle characteristics and demographic attributes.

Result 

For the initial project, Shoeless Joe’s selected 10 questions for their survey and four restaurant locations to deploy it to. The survey includes questions regarding where the customer originated from and is heading to next, as well as the customer’s spending patterns and frequency of visits to Shoeless Joe’s. On busy nights, one to two staff members are responsible for going table to table and facilitating the survey using the electronic mobile device.

Using FACES helped Shoeless Joe’s create a more streamlined process for collecting customer data, cataloguing it in a secure database, conducting sophisticated analysis and delivering actionable insight to help the company make more informed decisions regarding real estate, marketing, merchandising and branding. Working with PBS, Shoeless Joe’s has the tools to analyze the competition, gain a better understanding of its target customers and carefully evaluate potential areas for expansion.

Shoeless Joe’s Limited will continue to rely on this valuable customer data as the restaurant chain further repositions itself in the market and continues to open new sites. Shoeless Joe’s plans to implement FACES in additional stores and also plans to customize and add new questions to the survey to gather more targeted information about its customers. Constantly updating its target consumer demographic profile helps Shoeless Joe’s ensure that the brand continues to hit the mark. As a company nearing 25 years old, Shoeless Joe’s has older sites that need to be revived to ensure consistency with the brand.

As the restaurant chain continues to add new sites, FACES will play an important role in collecting this data and feeding it back into the Shoeless Joe’s market optimization model.