Lee’s Famous Recipe Chicken has been famous for its fast and never frozen chicken since 1966. While this iconic restaurant brand knows chicken, now with over one hundred franchisees, consistent brand communication of customer feedback has been one of the headquarters team’s biggest challenges. With new leadership on a small corporate team, a focus on how to increase communication and build up franchisee and operator support was top of mind.

The brand was missing vital customer feedback with no way to properly review or measure customer surveys or sentiment. Lee’s had built a manual, in-house website form which fed into an email-based system generated to the field operations team, who then had to forward emails to the correct people. It was time-consuming and ineffective. A proactive, private feedback strategy to capture happy and unhappy customer feedback to make informed decisions to drive business impact was needed.

To increase franchisee accountability with one central place for surveys and customer feedback, Lee’s Famous Recipe Chicken partnered with SOCi using SOCi Surveys, Social, Reviews, and Listings. SOCi Surveys took what was before a very manual process and streamlined it to proactively capture customer feedback. This process also decreases the number of negative reviews on public review networks, helping the restaurant with its reputation.

Lee’s implemented the SOCi platform, and specifically, SOCi Surveys, to gather all sentiment from inbound and website comments, which has allowed the brand to have a one-stop shop for franchisees and restaurant operators to view and respond to all forms of customer comments.

SOCi Results

SOCi Surveys is a better way for Lee’s Famous Recipe Chicken to deal with customer feedback. In a 30-day period alone, the restaurant has had 296 inbound web surveys across 127 locations.

Sokolik noted that Lee’s Vice President of Operations has begun sending out daily examples of customer survey feedback from stores to the entire company: “Since we’ve started doing that, we’ve seen more engagement. Franchisees get to hear more of the good, and the bad, from leadership. All of our multi-store operators are now using SOCi, which we see as a win.”

Since implementing SOCi surveys, Lee’s has seen a number of positive results, including:

• The ability to communicate with more customers.
• Increased response rate to customer feedback.
• Increased communication and engagement with customers.
• Reduced the amount of time it takes to respond to customer feedback.