Novus Leisure, the UK’s largest private bar and club operator, has teamed up with retail technology specialist Red Ant to build a unique real-time customer feedback app that will help to measure social sentiment, deliver live business insight and improve service.
Developed using Red Ant’s enterprise development platform RedConnect, the app is designed to give Novus’ Customer Experience, Bar and Club Managers unprecedented visibility of customer sentiment and social activity in their venues.
The app provides a dashboard via smartphone and tablet, which draws customer feedback and data from a broad range of sources:
Social interaction
- Overall customer sentiment from social media represented in an interactive word cloud which gives instant updates on what’s happening inside the bar from a customer perspective, in real time
- Combines Twitter, Facebook posts and instant messaging into one feed where staff can read, reply to and act on customer comments and enquiries
- Ability to not only reply to Twitter, Facebook posts and instant messages, but also to post content to these social channels
CRM
- Aggregated survey metrics and reviews from ratings sites such as TripAvisor, Design My Night and Square Meal
- Leaderboard comparing sentiment and activity across competitor venues
- Ability for individual bars to generate their own flash surveys to gather information on the night on service, bar staff etc
- Data is stored to build venue, staff and customer profiles for more accurate business planning and targeted marketing
Ecommerce
- Full integration with Nova, the industry’s biggest PoS system
- ‘Live’ sales data so that venues can measure performance and adapt promotional strategies to improve footfall and purchases, based on real-time facts and figures
- Overview of each bar, their performance and targets allows managers to share best practice and improve overall experience
The social media dashboard is currently being used by five venues, with full rollout to all 46 in Q1 2016. CRM and Ecommerce are due to be implemented over the next 12 months.
Simon Gaske, Novus’ Customer Experience Director, explains why the company needs it: “The people who come to Novus venues communicate with us and each other through social media. In a fast-moving, busy bar environment it’s incredibly difficult for front-of-house staff to keep track of what’s going on – having a real-time platform which taps into the likes of Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to capture how our customers feel is an invaluable tool for customer experience management. Working with Red Ant has enabled us to truly innovate in this area – something which makes Novus stand out from a very lively crowd”.
Dan Hartveld, Red Ant’s CTO, adds: “Businesses which rely on the quality of their customers’ experience, whether they’re in hospitality, retail or services, need to be able to understand how their customers feel in real time if they’re going to deliver a first-class service. Novus has taken a market-leading step in working with us to develop a fully-connected customer feedback platform which provides cross-business data at the right time, in the right place, to the right person.”