For Kirk Thompson, Vice President of Marketing for International House of Pancakes (IHOP), there has never been a single “a-ha” moment taken from the customer journey. Instead, it’s a customer loyalty equation.
“The biggest ‘ah-ha’ we monitor – and work to build – is our customer’s journey of turning frequency into loyalty, preference into love, visits into recommendations to friends, family, and colleagues,” Thompson told Loyalty360. “When we think about the impact and the importance of turning the customer experience into customer loyalty, we are motivated and driven by the enthusiasm our IHOP fans share with us…to turn more IHOP guests into long-term fans.”
Thompson explained that customer feedback is “at the center of our plate–literally and figuratively.”
IHOP customers are true fans of IHOP’s food, restaurants, and servers, and their feedback helps ensure favorite and new foods are at the center of a great IHOP visit, he said.
“Our customers regularly tell us how we are doing with our menu, our service and everything else about our restaurants, our people and our presence on media and in the community,” Thompson said. “In addition, we regularly engage guests as part of menu, restaurant, and service design. Where we succeed, guests are helping us make IHOP their preferred restaurant; where we have an occasional misstep, guests are helping us refine and optimize and make better what isn’t working as well as we hoped.”
IHOP’s Customer Experience strategies include short-term, medium and longer-term work.
“We are a 365-day a year restaurant–and much of our system includes 24-hour operations–which means our Customer Service focus, delivery, and feedback is continuous,” Thompson said. “We work short-term on immediate menu and service excellence; and we work medium- and longer-term to ensure technology, guest convenience, emerging food trends, and culinary preferences have the rigor of development, testing, and quality control to ensure great rollouts across all our restaurants so that each guest’s experience truly matters and consistently builds loyalty for the long term.”
The measurement processes differ based on the need to review and combine people measures, perception measures, quality, and consistency measures–across all aspects of visiting a restaurant and sharing a great meal, seeing strong value for the price and intending to return again, Thompson said.
“Meal and service measures are often very quick and in the moment,” he explained. “Convenience, technology, and long-term satisfaction measures are often longer halos, and we watch those closely as part of the testing and quality control processes for introducing new items to the menu or new services and environments for our restaurants.”