Huddle House and Perkins Restaurant and Bakery, under Ascent Hospitality Management (Ascent HM), is leveraging the benefits of SOCi Genius Reviews to scale review response management across 556 locations while keeping responses personalized and unique to each customer and situation.

Genius Reviews decreased Ascent HM’s review response time by five days and seven hours, with most now being responded to in 48 hours or less, making the net annual time savings for the brand approximately 1,524 hours of employee time saved per year. Genius Reviews automatically generates customized responses to customer reviews for each location, allowing restaurants to have review responses tailored to their unique guests, ensuring they feel seen and heard. The thousands of employee hours saved are now refocused on other tasks to drive the business forward.

Even large brands have marketing teams that simply cannot respond to every review promptly, with the time and attention to detail customers deserve. Research shows that 94% of consumers use reviews to make local purchasing decisions, but only 50% think brand responses are satisfying. Templated review responses are quickly outdated, repetitive, and boring. They also don’t provide any value back to the business by resolving negative reviews, nor do they aggregate review data. Ascent HM can now analyze shifts in its restaurants’ online reputations over time and be proactive instead of reactive to business inquiries and feedback, capturing more revenue with happier customers.

Since Genius Reviews implementation, Ascent HM has observed that responding to reviews is being recognized by customers, resulting in positive effects on the business. Ascent HM saw a 50.3% increase in positive reviews with Genius, showing that timely, personalized responses do improve customer experience and satisfaction, allowing each location to attract and retain happier customers.

SOCi Results

Since implementing Genius Reviews, Ascent HM has seen remarkable improvements in the company’s online review response rates across both the Perkins and Huddle House brands. The review response rate for all 556 Perkins and Huddle House locations is now 99%, which is a 450% increase from where they began at 18%.

Specifically, comparing the months of September and October of 2022 to September and October of 2023, the brands saw: