Tom Curtis, the president of Burger King, took so many calls earlier this year from customers after giving out his number that, on weekends, he was only allowed to take them on his porch.
“My wife wouldn’t let me in the house and take calls for hours on end,” Curtis said in an interview with Restaurant Business.
Curtis ultimately took 1,500 calls from customers around the country, and that was just a fraction of the total number of calls the company has fielded so far this year. Members of Curtis’s team took another 7,000 calls. And the company itself 64,000 overall.
That is an invaluable set of data for the Miami-based fast-food chain, which is still in the early stages of a multi-year comeback effort.
The conversations were designed to accomplished multiple goals: Give Burger King a marketing tool, connect the company with its customers in a unique way and give executives insight into the restaurants’ performance.
“There’s real learning in this,” Patrick Doyle, executive chairman of Burger King parent Restaurant Brands International, said in an interview. “Consumer research is wonderful and it can give you broad trends. But there is nothing like speaking to somebody directly about an issue.”
What’s more, Curtis has done this 1,500 times, and the company many thousands more times, giving them a bigger sense of issues.
For Burger King, which is coming out of a quarter in which its same-store sales rose 5.8%, the effort should pay dividends for a long time.
The company has been working to bolster its operations for years, using a varying combination of incentives and oversight of franchisees. The company kicked off an advertising campaign this year featuring Curtis effectively promising a better Burger King, highlighting the fact that he listened to customers.
The campaign made a point of retiring the old “creepy king” mascot, putting the customer at the center of its efforts, which highlights the brand’s longtime “have it your way” reputation. In recent years it has made a point of turning customers’ ideas for Whoppers into real products.
The phone calls are helping Burger King take that a step further. Curtis said the company plans to use them to help plan product innovation and improvement in the coming months and years.
But it’s already having an impact on the chain’s restaurants in a very real way, because they effectively notify top executives that there are broken signs. “It did have a profound impact on signage across the U.S.,” Curtis said.
One customer, in Great Falls, Montana, told Curtis about his store’s broken sign. “It’s just sad. I drive into Great Falls. I get off the exit, and the first thing I see is this Burger King with a sign missing. And it just makes me sad about where I live, that nobody has invested in it,” the customer said, as quoted by Doyle.
Burger King then used artificial intelligence to determine the number of restaurants that had broken or missing signage. The number was 81. And many of them have already been fixed.
But while the calls are providing real information about the status of Burger King’s 7,000 or so U.S. restaurants, they’re also giving Curtis feelings about the chain he runs. Because many of these calls or texts include something about customers’ love for the brand.
And so, he says, “I can’t stop taking calls.”
“It’s addicting,” he said. “It’s uplifting. Because they all start with something like, ‘You know, I haven’t been to Burger King in 20 years, and I went back and tried a Whopper and it’s fantastic.’ Or ‘You know, I’m really rooting for you guys, but can you please fix the sign in this town.’ Or ‘I want you to win’ or ‘I love Burger King.’
“And the end part is, ‘Thank you so much for talking to me’ and ‘this is such a great thing.’ And then they go tell their family and friends and then they go to Burger King.”
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