Case study: Red Robin Builds an agile Customer-Centric Culture With yammer
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For Customer Experience Professionals June 20, 2014
Case Study: Red Robin Builds An Agile
Customer-Centric Culture With Yammer
The Restaurant Uses Social Tools To Engage Employees And
Accelerate Innovations That Customers Crave
by TJ Keitt
with John Dalton, Maxie Schmidt-Subramanian, and Curt Nichols
Why Read This Report
Red Robin Gourmet Burgers, a US restaurant chain, competes in a crowded market where customer tastes
change rapidly. As such, the company must build an organization that can quickly change its customer
experience to satisfy its shifting customer demands. To fulfill this vision, Red Robin employs Yammer, a social
collaboration technology from Microsoft, to free the flow of information and knowledge within the company,
improving its organizational agility. This report shows customer experience (CX) professionals how social
technologies can play an instrumental role in helping the business respond to change as a matter of routine.
organizational changes strengthen Red robin’s customer experience
Red Robin Gourmet Burgers claims three core competencies: customer experience, burgers, and
shakes. Chris Laping, the restaurant’s senior vice president (SVP) of business transformation and chief
information officer (CIO), says that another key capability buttresses these competencies: the ability to
drive change. Red Robin sits in a fickle market where customers’ culinary preferences can quickly shift,
requiring the restaurant to perceive and respond to these changes rapidly. To build customer-centric
responsiveness into the organization, Red Robin:
■ Married learning, operations, and technology management. In order to drive change, Steve Carley,
Red Robin’s chief executive officer, aligned learning and development, operations services, technology
management, and project management under Chris Laping in 2011. The first three groups handle the
people, restaurant processes, and technology changes, respectively. The project management office
orchestrates the changes across these groups to ensure continuity. Collectively, this group informs all
changes to the customer experience from employee uniforms to menus and customer-facing mobile apps.
■ Allowed change to come bottom-up instead of top-down. As head of business transformation, Chris
believes change is best enacted “where employees meet customers.” In order to do this, he needed to give
these employees — particularly the 22,000 team members working in the restaurants — a voice.1 One of
his early acts leading business transformation was to introduce Yammer, a social collaboration tool, to
Red Robin. The cloud-based technology is an important conduit for employees to report on customers’
impressions and recommend service and even menu changes to the corporate operations group.
■ Focused on getting workers invested in change. The youth of Red Robin’s workforce — 87% are Gen
Yers (those born between 1980 and 2000) — led Chris to seek technologies that he believed would
appeal to this younger demographic. While this is becoming a common response to the influx of Gen
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Case Study: Red Robin Builds An Agile Customer-Centric Culture With Yammer 2
Yers into business, the benefits of these decisions redound to the entire workforce. Yammer
ensures that employee reports on conditions in the restaurants get an audience with company
leadership, which in turn encourages further workforce participation.
Yammer Encourages The Free Flow Of Customer And Employee Insights
Microsoft’s social technology empowers workers with the freedom to access, share, and use data
and information, interact with peers who can help them do their jobs, and move about the physical
workspace as needed (see Figure 1).2 Forrester believes these capabilities are essential to business
agility.3 Chris’ team built two Yammer networks — Yummerversity, a training network for the
hourly workforce, and Yummer, a network connecting corporate staff and restaurant managers — to
supercharge customer-centric information flows. These networks:
■ Allow employees to learn best practices and share new ones. Yummerversity is part of
a broader set of interactive training tools that include videos and games. Once employees
complete the formal training program, they’re granted access to Yummerversity — a place
where they can talk to other employees who have gone through the training and communicate
with corporate trainers. As these workers progress, they can submit amendments to training
materials if they have improved part of a process. Red Robin’s trainers review these submissions
and, if more effective, add them to the curriculum.
■ Provide corporate leaders with a view of the restaurant experience. Yummer provides Red
Robin’s operations leaders with a direct line to restaurant managers. As managers raise issues
related to processes, food quality, and customer impressions, Red Robin is able to collect
these sentiments in real time. It also gathers any suggestions these frontline workers have for
improving the employee or customer experience. This is part of the “grassroots change” that
Chris envisioned when he first piloted Yammer in early 2012.
■ Give managers access to experts within Red Robin’s corporate arm. Chris said that the
manager’s role is to serve customers, not be an expert on corporate operations. That’s why
Yummer has become an important avenue for managers to receive the operational support they
need — from operational experts. Within Yummer are resources that provide managers with
recipes, operational standards, and corporate memos. Because these materials are posted to
Yummer, managers and corporate operations leaders can discuss the content and collaboratively
work on improvements as necessary.
■ Work natively on mobile devices, allowing all employees into the conversation. Red Robin
has deployed 1,700 iPads across its organization to give its restaurant employees access to
training content. The camera-equipped tablets also allow those employees to take an active role
in their employer’s improvements. For example, if workers come up with a more efficient way to
clean soft-serve ice-cream machines, they can film it and submit it to Yummerversity. And we
know giving employees latitude to solve problems on their own is important to engagement.4
© 2014, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited June 20, 2014For Customer Experience Professionals
Case Study: Red Robin Builds An Agile Customer-Centric Culture With Yammer 3
Figure 1 Yammer Helps Red Robin Achieve The Agility Necessary To Tune Its Customer Experience
Yummer provides managers with
access to recipes, operational
standards, and memos.
Conversely, it provides corporate
with a window into store ops.
Yummerversity provides additional
training and information to
restaurant staff.
Freedom to access
and use information
Freedom to interact with
Freedom to move
whoever can help
as necessary
address the issue
Both Yammer networks are Yummer provides a conduit for
accessible on the 1,700 iPads restaurant managers to
Red Robin deploys to its communicate with corporate
restaurant locations. This operations people. Likewise,
allows training and Yummerversity allows
communication to happen communication between staff
anywhere in the restaurant. and corporate trainers.
117046 Source: Forrester Research, Inc.
Customer-Centric Agility Helps Red Robin Win Big
Freeing team members to access information, interact, and move allows Red Robin to effectively
improve both customer and employee experiences. Chris provides two compelling proof points of
success in these areas:
■ Instant customer feedback helped build a better burger. In 2012, Red Robin launched a
new hamburger, the Tavern Double. Managers in the restaurants where the burger was piloted
collected customer feedback in real time and funneled it back to Red Robin’s corporate offices
via Yummer. As a result, the operations group quickly identified problems with the recipe and
implemented a solution in four weeks — a dramatic turnaround, compared with the 18 months
once required to test and iterate new menu items. The Tavern Double became the most successful
hamburger launch in Red Robin’s 44-year history.
© 2014, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited June 20, 2014For Customer Experience Professionals
Case Study: Red Robin Builds An Agile Customer-Centric Culture With Yammer 4
■ Easily accessible and engaging training materials reduce employee churn. Red Robin incurs
high costs for hiring and training new employees. More importantly, though, constantly shifting
staffs affected the customer experience as the quality of service changed with new employees
coming up to speed. Red Robin’s new iPad-based training program, of which Yummerversity
was an element, was meant to reduce turnover by 1%. The interactive program that encouraged
employees to help improve restaurant processes exceeded these expectations, helping reduce
churn by approximately 9% — more than paying for itself by reducing hiring and training costs.
R e c o m m e n d at i o n s
How To Follow The Red Robin Example
Red Robin’s experience with Yammer shows that when properly deployed, social technologies enable
firms to cultivate business agility in a manner that serves both company and customer goals. To get
the biggest return on your social technology investments, firms must:
■ Make your CIO a key player in ecosystem design. Red Robin made its CIO the focal point
of its people, process, and technology transformation. While you don’t need to give the CIO
a coordination role, your CIO should be part of a team that brings together your operations,
human resources, and technology teams. As Red Robin demonstrates, these groups are
essential to reacting to market change. This team must have the ear of top executives, so
it’s also essential that a representative of the C-suite either be present as a team member or
sponsor the team’s activities and decisions.
■ Focus on helping employees navigate processes. Chris used Yammer to make
communications and training procedures more inclusive. As you build technology in your
ecosystem, you must have a vision for how it will remove barriers within the employee,
partner, or customer journeys. Journey and ecosystem maps can play a key role in building
that vision because they will uncover roadblocks. These lessons will help your CIO target her
technology implementations, ensuring that the tools meet your executives’ expectations.
■ Allow experimentation with different technology solutions. Chris introduced Yammer as
a small pilot to see if the workforce would find value. Because rapid market changes mean
you can’t plan out long-term solutions, your organization must be willing to experiment.
Cloud applications like Yammer make this experimentation more palatable to executives
because the apps require minimal financial and infrastructure commitments. Work with your
technologists to ensure that the cloud tools you wish to use meet your security and compliance
policies and to help you manage the service-level agreements associated with these services.
■ Create concrete metrics to assess the technology’s success. Chris chose Yammer in part
because he believed that it would appeal to his young workforce. The bet paid off: Red Robin
attributes a significant drop in attrition, in part, to Yammer. You should have a concrete
© 2014, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited June 20, 2014For Customer Experience Professionals
Case Study: Red Robin Builds An Agile Customer-Centric Culture With Yammer 5
idea of the problem(s) you’re addressing with the technology you imbed in your ecosystem.
As such, you should have improvements you would like to see as a consequence of using
this technology: faster response times and improved customer satisfaction are a couple of
examples. Use these metrics to make adjustments to your technology implementations as
well as to justify future investments.
Supplemental Material
Companies Interviewed For This Report
Red Robin
Endnotes
1
That sets it apart from other companies. In a recent survey about capabilities of voice of the customer
programs, only 36% of companies collect and report employee insights on customer issues. That means they
miss out on important insights those employees have about customer issues and the possible solutions to those
issues. Failing to solicit employee feedback also misses a key opportunity to engage employees by listening to
them. See the June 20, 2014, “The State Of Voice Of The Customer Programs, 2014: It’s Time To Act” report.
2
Forrester considers these freedoms to be part of the flexible employee experience workers need to serve
customers. See the May 23, 2014, “Want A Healthy Customer Experience Ecosystem? Free Your Workers”
report.
3
Forrester has identified 10 dimensions of business agility. Two concern market agility. That is, responding
to changes in customers. Three address organizational agility or how people and culture can make
an organization more agile. And five address process agility, which covers the traditional technology
management elements of agility. Together these 10 dimensions span the qualities that make agile companies
faster and more responsive to both customer and internal forces of change. See the September 9, 2013, “The
10 Dimensions Of Business Agility” report.
4
Forrester correlated the attribute “I feel empowered to solve my own problems and challenges at work” to
aggregate satisfaction scores of 10 collaboration technologies — email, calendar, instant messaging, web
meetings, video chat, file sync and sharing tools, team document sites, blogs, microblogs, and social
networks — aggregate satisfaction scores for seven data technologies — employee intranet/portal, online
storage tools, data dashboards, expense tracking, customer relationship management, project and task
management, and role- or department-specific apps — and satisfaction with applications on a tablet
computer. The Pearson coefficients were 0.340 for the attribute and collaboration technologies, 0.329 for
the attribute and data technologies, and 0.373 for the attribute and tablet computer apps. Source: Forrsights
Applications And Collaboration Workforce Survey, Q4 2013.
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