Pleasing fickle consumers and investing in employees were among the main themes of a CEO panel that wrapped up the 55th annual MUFSO conference in Dallas Tuesday.
The panel of Golden Chain Award winners was a highlight of the conference, which is produced by Nation’s Restaurant News, in partnership with sister publications Restaurant Hospitality and Food Management.
This year, MUFSO attracted roughly 1,000 attendees, including a cross section of restaurant operators, exhibitors and industry professionals, who spent three days learning, networking, dining and raising the occasional glass.
The Golden Chain panel included the chief executives of Cracker Barrel Old Country Store, Taco Bell, 7-Eleven, Potbelly and Texas Roadhouse, a group representing a collective $14 billion in U.S. sales, and about 15,000 restaurants around the world.
The executives described the challenges of pleasing an evolving consumer that might love your brand one minute and hate it the next — and is likely to share both views via social media.
For example, a Taco Bell team that watches consumer impressions closely from the company’s Fishbowl social media listening center know in real time whether the coffee was hot or service was good in any restaurant on a given day, said Greg Creed, CEO of the Irvine, Calif.-based chain.
Taco Bell also mines that content for ways to use “stories” that can be shared about the brand from the customer perspective.
“We have to become publishers, not marketers,” Creed said.
Creed, who will become CEO of parent company Yum! Brands Inc. in January, hopes to “leverage a culture that fuels results” across all of the Louisville, Ky.-based company’s brands, as he has done at Taco Bell, he said. That kind of culture develops over time, with a focus on both employees and customers.
Inevitably, there are mistakes along the way, but learning from those mistakes is most important. Cracker Barrel CEO Cochran shared a story about the implementation of a new program designed to speed service that negatively altered the relationship regular customers had with their favorite servers.
“We found we had a lot of regular customers that didn’t like being served by other people,” Cochran said. “[Their regular server] knew what kind of jam they liked or who liked their bacon served extra crispy. That relationship needs to be protected, almost above anything else.”
Cochran, who served in the U.S. Army after college, said one of the things she’s most proud of at Cracker Barrel is the robust training it provides employees of the company. Managers spend time at the company’s Lebanon, Tenn., home office and every restaurant has a training room and training coordinator.
“That’s the way you invest in your people,” she said.
Aylwin Lewis, president and CEO of Chicago-based Potbelly, agreed that training is critical to success, describing himself as a “teaching-people-how-to-fish person.”
But he also advocates “hiring hard and managing easy,” saying Potbelly looks for workers with a certain “friendliness quotient.”
“We want people with personalities, people who will smile and have fun with customers,” Lewis said. “Turnover, to me, starts with selection. Don’t hire the wrong person. That’s like injecting a cancer into your organization.”
MUFSO 2015 is scheduled for Sept. 20-22, also at the Hyatt Regency Reunion Tower in Dallas.
Contact Lisa Jennings at [email protected].
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