Customer Engagement Impacts the Bottom Line

The study measured Customer Engagement levels of 1,200 diners along with the financial performance of publicly traded restaurant chains, including Red Lobster, Applebee's and Olive Garden. Customer Engagement is a term we are using to describe how emotionally connected a customer is to a company or brand. An engaged customer is more than loyal or a "promoter," they are also willing to go out of their way to dine at a particular restaurant and actually love the dining experience.

Our study found that restaurant chains with high Customer Engagement scores far outperformed low-scoring

counterparts in a number of key financial metrics. We found:

• Average Gross Margin for high-performers of 29% vs. -12% for low-performers
• EPS Growth for high-performers of 75% vs. -50% for low-performers

Emotional Customer Experiences are Priceless

So if Customer Engagement has a profound impact on the bottom line, what can restaurants do to improve this key metric? The answer is to manage customer experiences.

Restaurants have long been focused on perfecting functional customer experiences - those related to food quality, food

temperature, cleanliness and basic service elements. Findings from our study show that functional experiences are important to manage and are the "price of admission" for a customer to be engaged. But to fully engage a customer, it is the emotional experiences that really matter.

Emotional experiences are memorable, lasting and more difficult for competitors to easily match. What are the most important emotional experiences for a casual dining customer? It begins with having engaged employees making the customer experience fun. According to a recent Inc. Magazine article, fun is the new core value for both employees and customers. We could not agree

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