How Robeks Found "Aha!" Moments That Improve Franchise Performance

Our Partnership

Robeks & Tattle

Robeks is a smoothie franchise chain headquartered in Los Angeles, California, founded in 1996. And in 2023, in just under 30 years, they hit their 100th store milestone.

They're a popular brand among consumers, enabling guests to get their daily vitamins in a single serving — all without sacrificing creativity and taste.

• Integrations: Olo, Toast, Punchh
• Locations: 102
• Survey Completion Rate: 92.1%

The Challenge

Expensive Mystery Shops Didn't Represent Actual Guests

Before Tattle, Robeks relied on mystery shoppers to gauge guest experiences at the store level.

"Those programs were good and served the purpose, but the shoppers weren't our customers, and were outside the demographics we were serving," said Mike Pisani, VP of Operations at Robeks.

Mike and the team decided to engage a third-party survey platform in order to reach more of the customer base. While evaluating most of the providers, they ultimately landed on Tattle.

"I was blown away by the attention to detail and the one-to-one interaction that Tattle provides as opposed to other competitor platforms," said Mike. "Tattle's ability to customize the program for a company our size simply knocked it out of the park."

The Solution

A Partnership Beyond The Dashboard

Robeks had three things they were looking for in evaluating a third-party survey platform.

There were three things Robeks was looking for when evaluating a third-party survey platform:

• Customer service: A hands-on CX partner who cares about their needs.
• Knowledgeable Account Manager: someone who can both execute the program, and point the team to the important takeaways.
• Cost-efficiency: A tool that provided a much bigger bang for their buck.

Robeks found that Tattle met all of their qualifications – and then some.

Reliable, fast, and friendly service. Always.

"We need that one-on-one attention from our partner," said Mike. "Our Account Manager gives us exactly that. She shows me key data insights so I don't have to spend hours a day getting lost in the information."

Mike soon discovered that the Tattle team always researched the most accurate answers.

"There's a level of honesty there. Whether it's questions from me, our VP of Tech, or our Regional Managers – we ask questions that are way in the weeds, but our Account Manager always checks to make sure we get the most accurate information," said Mike. "And I really appreciate that."

The Solution

Quickly Pinpoint Patterns, Root Issues, & Opportunities

The Robeks team was mind-blown by how powerful the Tattle platform is.

In particular, Mike and his team especially loved how the platform breaks down the entire guest experience into actionable factors. This allows Robeks to quickly uncover the real reasons behind fluctuations in sales.

"For example, at one location we were putting our foot on the gas to improve speed of service, we saw in Tattle that our accuracy became a huge issue: we were getting orders out so quickly that the products were below our company standard," Mike said.

In turn, Mike facilitated a franchisee training to make sure every order meets the company standard. Soon enough, accuracy scores improved.

Here's one of those "Aha!" moments for you...

A discovery that Robeks made was that the seasoned employees – often staffed during important day parts – don't always provide the most hospitable experience for guests, as reflected by Tattle's hospitality markers.

Armed with the data, Robeks implemented a specialized training plan to improve their scores – and over the next few weeks, their hospitality scores gradually rose across those problematic day parts.

The Solution

Easy Buy-in From Franchisees and Regional Managers

New tech can pose an adoption issue. That's not the case with Tattle.

"Change is always difficult, especially in a franchise environment," Mike said. "I thought Tattle was going to be a tough sell."

But to his surprise, Tattle's ease of use and visual dashboards resonated very well with the franchisees, who told Mike they were "pleased to see both the positive feedback and areas of opportunities."

Whether they have prior restaurant experience or not, Robeks' franchisees can easily navigate Tattle without much training, and instantaneously point to their own areas of opportunities with no trouble.

Tattle has become a key agenda item during Robeks' operations meeting.

Regional Managers use Tattle to go over store performance with their General Managers, looking at day parts, ordering channels, root-cause factors, and more, discussing the top issues identified in the dashboard.

"In order to have relevant discussions with franchisees, you have to share not what you think, but what you can prove," said Mike. "Tattle added meat on the bones for us as to what we need to do, where we have opportunities, and what we're doing well — you can't name these things from social media or from the great abyss of the internet. It's a great tool to have for internal conversations."