When Your Onsite Audience Dwarfs Everything Else

Starting from the Top

Today, roughly 2 to 3 million people enter and exit a Dave & Buster's location on an annual basis. Across their 84 locations, that's an average total of 168,000,000 guests who come onsite at a Dave & Buster's annually and have an experience. Naturally, due to what feels like an endless parade of onsite activities ranging from chowing down on some grub to playing arcade games at Midway or grabbing a beer at the bar to watching sporting events, like the Mets hang on for dear life in the National League East, Dave & Buster's customers come in droves.

• Onsite Traffic: 168,000,000
• Google Searches for 'Dave & Busters': 720,000
• Facebook Followers: 570,277
• Twitter Followers: 29,000
• Instagram Followers: 20,300

As a helpful point of comparison, outside of these socially driven media properties, a more local focused network in Yelp accounted for roughly 69M unique users through Q1 2016 across its platform. To highlight, Dave & Buster's has seen more onsite traffic across its 84 locations than Yelp has experienced across its entire user base which happens to span roughly 30 countries. 

The Growing Customer Analytics Market

So, I know what your thinking, why the math lesson, right?

Well, it's these social media properties, specifically Yelp, that have been steadily uncovering a data and insights revenue channel due to the massive amount of insights that they have collected to date. In Yelp's case, they are currently sitting on top of over 100M user reviews, which extends to over 10 industries, all of which falls under the market category of customer analytics and experience management. 

Combined, these markets are pacing to grow to roughly $13B by 2019, representing an extremely large and growing opportunity for customer experience and relationship management platforms. In recent news, Yelp announced the release of Yelp Knowledge, allowing vendors, such as, Medallia, Reputology, Revinate, and Sprinklr to provide individual and nationwide businesses with more structured insights for manageable analysis and decision making from its platform.

Want to Take This Onsite?

What we know is this, among Dave & Buster's top 10 locations that have seen the highest Yelp review volume, they have collectively driven the following  from each location over the last 11 years:

• Total Reviews: 6,600
• Average Years in Business per Location: 8.3
• Average Annual Reviews per Location: 80
• Average Monthly Reviews per Location: 7

Despite Dave & Busters' millions of onsite guests, they typically only see 7 monthly reviews per location! To pour salt in the wound, by Yelp's own admission, 20% of their reviews are identified as "suspicious" and filtered out of the system. 

Ultimately, if you can imagine a totem pole that signifies the pecking order of the most illustrious and untapped audiences to extract customer insights—at the top of this decadent pole would be its onsite guests, assuming nearly ~99.99% of its height, and, conversely, all of its above mentioned social media property audiences would account for just .003% of Dave & Buster's total customer audiences where customer insights live.  

Yikes. 

More Insights, More Better

With over 168,000,000 onsite guests frequenting Dave & Buster's annually—it's confirmed: that's a lot freaking people! More importantly, as we've seen, the aforementioned onsite audience opportunity has inevitably raised the question among savvy and sophisticated marketing and operations teams, 'How can we capitalize on our own hard work? I mean, we brought in all these guests, how can we get better through this untapped audience?'

In an effort to connect the splattering of dots—if tried and true local business traffic lives onsite, if public reviews are 20% fabricated, and if, lastly, these reviews by nature are not within the realm of marketing and operations teams' sense of control, then shouldn't teams direct their efforts to extracting insights from their actual onsite audience? Ya know, to the 168,000,000+ customers onsite?

Let me put it this way—in February 2016, Tattle launched with Dig Inn—a multi-location, farm-to-table, QSR marketplace located in Manhattan—at their Hudson Street and 52nd Street locations to help their team collect onsite guest feedback regarding the introduction of their medium plate size and elimination of both their large and small plate options, i.e. portioning was inconsistent, fearing customer erosion would soon follow during a time when customer loyalty was pivotal to the brand as the team prepared for scale to additional locations. 

Over the course of 30-days, Tattle drove Dig Inn 1,151 feedback submissions that comprised roughly 17,000 questions answered by Dig Inn customers. During this period, Tattle drove 93.93% of Dig Inn's feedback from onsite guests of whom exhibited a 99.53% survey completion rate when visiting Tattle's branded merchant landing page, i.e. tattleapp.com/diginn. In terms of feedback comparison—over the last 5 years, Dig Inn had only seen 287 total Yelp reviews among these locations, not counting an admitted 20% fabrication rate or the qualitative forfeiture of obtaining feedback that Dig Inn has not pointedly asked for nor can control. 

Evidently, the collection of public customer analytics data is a beleaguered mission as businesses are forced to rely upon data sets and audiences that are retroactive, skewed and diminished in ways that they cannot afford. 

Dave & Buster's Launch

In light of Dave & Buster's robust onsite audience, they want feedback. Good, old-fashioned customer feedback that is 'engaging' and 'emotionally charged' and prompted to customers in a way that is 'targeted', 'innovative' and 'mobile focused'. 

This week, Tattle will be launching with Dave & Buster's to accomplish this mission exactly. For launch, we will be partnering alongside Signal360 and their proprietary beacon technology to target Dave & Buster's onsite guests and serve them an adaptive and conversational survey aimed to uncover the many insights that the Dave & Buster's team needs to inform their customer journey. D&B will now be able to collect vastly more insights about the areas of their business that they care most about to make better decisions, manage customer relationships, and unlock their largest untapped audience yet.

From the 80's through Today

In 2006, Danny Meyer, Founder of Union Square Hospitality and Shake Shake, published a hospitality classic called Setting the Table, citing his experiences and guiding principles that helped him deliver outstanding service to the customers of his businesses. In Setting the Table, Danny refers to a time in the mid-80s when utilizing a paper comment card to collect guest insights was 'an innovation of sorts' and how he would 'personally respond to every comment card' to ensure that guests 'feel like they are being heard even when they aren't always right.' More surprising than Danny's dedication to a hospitality standard, which has been the core of his incredible successes, is that his locations typically saw 100 comment cards weekly at his Union Square Cafe. That's right, 100 submission from onsite guests weekly!

In a recently published article by Street Fight, they quoted Chad Richard Yelp's Senior VP of Corporate and Business Development regarding the Yelp Knowledge impact on businesses, saying, “[The data] allows them to make very important business decisions, we think this kind of analysis is just critical for modern marketing. With 100 million reviews in Yelp right now, there’s untapped knowledge." 

I couldn't agree more, and much like Danny Meyer lived, Dave & Buster's knows, and Tattle has proved, businesses must direct priority to their onsite guests first, who represent their largest, most engaged and untapped audiences.