Chain restaurants are not particularly known for having outstanding customer service and Tattle wants to fix this through its omnichannel guest feedback solution that’s easily installed across transaction channels such as kiosks, WiFi, websites, etc., through an API. Tattle’s solution identifies opportunities for improvement and allows individual locations to set metrics to maximize revenue performance. Tattle is currently used by chains like Bareburger and The Halal Guys.
Alleywatch sat down with CEO and Founder Alex Beltrani to find out what makes Tattle different than other CX systems on the market.
Tell us about the product or service that Tattle offers.
Tattle is a Customer Experience Improvement (CXI) platform that works with chain restaurants, such as MOD Pizza, Blaze Pizza, B.GOOD, Bareburger, The Halal Guys, and others, to improve guest satisfaction, operational performance, and increase unit revenue at each location by leveraging omnichannel guest feedback.
What inspired you to start Tattle?
From 1984 to 2001, my parents were owners of a continental restaurant in Port Jefferson, Long Island called The Village Way. While my father is still convinced he created the boneless buffalo wing neither of my parents were restaurant savants, and they quickly realized guest input would be critical to their success. As a solution, my parents relied heavily on paper customer comment cards for measuring guest satisfaction—a method popularized by Denny’s in the early 1980s that swept the nation as a best practice for feedback collection.
In 2001, soon after my parents sold The Village Way, public review sites became more popular, and much of the control and privacy business owners had around customer feedback began to decline. Older feedback tools, such as mystery shoppers and paper comment cards, were missing out on all the data points available for operational improvement within the hospitality industry.
Inspired by my parents’ usage of guest feedback, our team has set out to reimagine the paper comment card, as well as the balance of power between the hospitality industry and 3rd party providers in the age of the smartphone.
How is Tattle different?
Today, the guest experience is dramatically different than it was ten years ago. Tattle is the only CXI platform in hospitality that aligns with this ever-evolving guest experience landscape. We enable our partners to integrate and collect feedback through our open-API across all their guest transaction channels, such as digital ordering, loyalty, kiosk, point-of-sale, WiFi, website, and more. With roughly 53% of meals being experienced outside the walls of a restaurant, we provide restaurants with a holistic view of their guest satisfaction across all ordering channels, especially the opaque world of digital ordering.
From an actionability standpoint, our team has rectified the inefficiencies of older solutions to ensure we are helping restaurant teams make sense of their data for more guided improvement. My dad slogged through Excel spreadsheets, manual data input, and data analysis for hours. Tattle differentiates by showcasing the most opportunistic areas for improvement at each location. If implemented, these improvements can significantly increase overall guest satisfaction and revenue.
On a monthly basis, our platform alerts our customers’ onsite team members of these opportunities. The application also designates a goal to reach by the end of the month, and it allows the team to commit to action items in support of reaching the improvement goal. We’ve discovered that when a location team focuses on the top improvement opportunity, rather than multiple areas that may not factor as much in the guest experience, that location can realize greater success and higher revenue. Imagine OKRs for companies like Google. We’ve applied that execution strategy to the paradigm of guest feedback and operational performance for chain restaurants and other hospitality merchants.
Who do you consider to be your primary competitors?
To date, roughly 70% of our customers have transitioned from their mystery shopper program to Tattle. Believe it or not, the mystery shopper market is a large, $1B+ market. Generally, the sentiment of our customers is that they would like to collect statistically significant feedback volume from their guests, as opposed to bi-monthly reports from auditors that do not effectively encapsulate the entirety of store performance over a given period. The remainder of our customers have transitioned from legacy-based feedback systems, as they seek greater simplicity and actionability of data for all of their team members, especially the onsite operators.
To date, roughly 70% of our customers have transitioned from their mystery shopper program to Tattle. Believe it or not, the mystery shopper market is a large, $1B+ market.
What market does Tattle target and how big is it?
Currently, our focus is on the chain restaurant market, as we are the industry’s only pure-play solution. Alternatively, since feedback is critical to any customer-facing vertical, such as hotels, retail, transportation, movie theatres, and more, we envision expansion beyond the restaurant industry.
What’s your business model?
We charge our customers a monthly subscription at each of their locations.
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
We plan to assemble a team of passionate people excited to work at an early stage startup in hospitality tech while making it their mission to help our customers uncover the data needed to make operational improvements that lead to higher guest satisfaction and revenue.
What advice can you offer companies in New York that do not have a fresh injection of capital in the bank?
Keep going! No retreat, no surrender.
Where do you see the company going now over the near term?
Currently, we are working with some incredible restaurant brands, many of which have been instrumental in shaping the Tattle platform. While we are intent on continuing to grow our customer base, we plan to use this capital to define Tattle as the most useful and innovative CXI platform the hospitality industry has ever seen.
