zpizza, a Laguna Beach, California, organic pizza chain has rolled out a new customer intelligence platform called KnowledgeForce from Market Force Information, a worldwide leader in customer intelligence solutions. The new platform is enabling its restaurants to quickly get a view of how their stores are operating by integrating customer satisfaction surveys, mystery shopping audits, Yelp commentary, and related analytics. zpizza vice president of operations Amir Sabetian uses the system daily to read customer comments and quickly follow up on any emerging challenges.
zpizza Sells Organic Pizza to Growing Fan Base
zpizza is a rapidly growing restaurant chain that was founded 25 years ago in the Laguna Beach art colony. It uses organic wheat flour, cheese and toppings, and are one of the few pizza brands that accommodate various healthy diets, from vegan to gluten-free, while still delivering the indulgent flavors that pizza lovers crave.
zpizza’s rapid franchisee growth meant they needed to make it easy to maintain the high standards they had established for the brand in every location, in every state. To do so, the company uses multiple measurement tools, ranging from mystery shopping audits to customer satisfaction surveys and social media posts. Locations that score well on customer service metrics sell more, based on company findings, because customers get the great food they love coupled with friendly service. The new KnowledgeForce customer intelligence platform will enable zpizza restaurants to quickly assess how they’re doing across all of their key measures, to see how they compare to others and to take action to improve in any areas that are lagging.
“Our critically-acclaimed pizza is a true Laguna Beach original,” says Sabetian. “We needed to make sure that great product and great service is replicated in every location. Because we know that if our restaurants serve consumers with great products and great service, those consumers will come back more often, spend more and even refer their friends. That’s one of the ways in which we can grow the business. Market Force’s new customer intelligence platform is game-changing for us.”
KnowledgeForce: The Big Data Challenge
More than three years ago, Market Force recognized that its large retail and restaurant clients needed a more powerful platform that could integrate multiple data streams—regardless if the data was collected by Market Force, generated internally by the client, or provided by a third party. And, it had to keep up with the rapid rise in volume. The company developed KnowledgeForce to meet that requirement, and has now successfully implemented it within more than two-dozen companies across North America.
“KnowledgeForce was designed to meet the needs of a great company like zpizza,” says Scott Griffith, Market Force’s executive business strategist and consultant to zpizza. “Integrating customer-related data to get a holistic view of all their locations at a glance provides a powerful tool to help manage the business. KnowledgeForce does that in a way that makes it central to their day-to-day operations.”
“Managing the many data inputs of even smaller operations can quickly get to big data proportions,” adds Marcus Daley, Market Force’s chief technology officer. “We’ve designed the platform to address that challenge, and make it trivial for our clients to provide the data to us in whatever format suits them. Companies like zpizza can also link to other sources that are important to them, such as Yelp.”
The KnowledgeForce customer intelligence platform enables retailers and other multi-location businesses to get the benefits of big data computing in the cloud, without the need to invest in expensive computing power or development. As a result, executives can be armed with real-time data about the operations of each of their stores and the analysis to quickly pinpoint where action needs to be taken to improve performance.
