A customer doesn’t need a survey to tell you something’s wrong. Sometimes all it takes is a review.
That’s the theme that came through loud and clear when Alchemer CMO, Bo Bandy, sat down with Holly Earle-Schultze, marketing director for Figaro’s Pizza and Pizza Schmizza, and Kim Streitmatter, an analyst at True Food Kitchen, for a webinar on turning guest feedback into smarter operations.
Both brands run multiple locations. And both have found that the fastest way to catch a problem, fix a menu mistake, or settle a debate in the kitchen is to listen to their guests.
Here’s how it played out for each brand, in their own words.
Watch the full webinar, From Reviews to Results: How Multi-Location Brands Turn Guest Feedback into Smarter Operations, here.
Figaro’s Pizza & Pizza Schmizza: Turning 50 independent franchisees into one listening system
Holly Earle-Schultze has spent 22 years as marketing director for Figaro’s Pizza and Pizza Schmizza, two franchised pizza brands with 50 locations across the country and zero corporate-owned stores. That structure means every location has its own owner, its own priorities, and its own reasons to care (or not) about a review left on Google.
Holly says the shift toward taking guest feedback seriously started around COVID, when reviews began pouring in faster than the team could track them. Figaro’s was already using Alchemer for local pages on its website, but reviews weren’t yet a daily habit. Once SEO analysts started emphasizing how much responding to reviews mattered, it became clear this wasn’t just about customers complaining. Everyone else searching online was seeing it too.
An oven, a burnt crust, and an easy fix
One of the clearest examples of feedback driving operational change occurred when multiple customers from one location reported that their pizza crusts were burnt. It turned out the oven temperature at that location was set too high for the space. It was an easy fix once the team could see the pattern, but Holly notes they never would have known without the reviews sitting right in front of them.
Reviews have also shaped the menu directly. Because of the number of customers flagging allergy concerns, Figaro’s added a gluten-free crust based on feedback surfaced through Alchemer.
Getting 50 franchisees to actually care
Getting buy-in across 50 independently owned locations isn’t automatic. Holly’s approach: connect reviews to revenue.
Holly walks franchisees through what a single loyal customer is worth. She’ll point to a specific longtime regular, calculate their annual spend using POS data, and then multiply that out across the customers a bad experience could cost. It’s a simple exercise, but it reframes a one-star review as a line item.
“Taking it from an actual review to having money involved in it really seems to get my franchisees’ attention.” — Holly Earle-Schultze, Marketing Director, Figaro’s Pizza & Pizza Schmizza
She’s also shown franchisees something even more motivating: reviews where a customer’s star rating went up after the owner responded to a low-rated review, thanking them for making it right. That kind of proof travels faster than a lecture on SEO ever could.
Rolling out AI-assisted responses
With franchisees stretched thin running their stores, Figaro’s has started piloting AI-generated review responses that reply immediately, in the brand’s own voice and language, with the option for the owner to add more if needed.
“It’s so slick. It responds immediately. It responds in our store, our franchise verbiage, our language, and what we would say and feel.” — Holly Earle-Schultze,
Looking back, Holly says she’d have rolled out both the AI responses and a competitive benchmarking view sooner. She now customizes competitor tracking down to the location level, so a franchisee in a small town sees the right nearby competition, not a generic citywide list.
True Food Kitchen: Turning sentiment data into a company-wide operating rhythm
True Food Kitchen operates 45 flagship restaurants across 18 states, all corporately owned, all built around a globally inspired menu that changes four times a year. That seasonal cadence is exactly why analyst Kim Streitmatter says the brand needed more than raw review counts.
When you’re rotating a full seasonal menu four times a year, you can’t rely on guessing how guests feel about the changes. True Food Kitchen needed the “why” behind the reviews, and sentiment tagging inside Alchemer gave the team that context.
The chopped salad, and the fastest menu reversal in company history
Chopped salad had been on the True Food Kitchen menu for nearly 15 years, surviving every seasonal rotation, until it was cut from the menu in spring 2024. Because sentiment was already tracked as a tag inside the food category, the team saw an unprecedented spike in negative sentiment almost immediately. Kim says it was the sharpest single-tag spike she’s seen in seven years of doing this work. The salad went back on the menu just seven weeks later, in time for the summer rollout.
“It was all hands on deck to bring that back — a huge one for us, and we wouldn’t have been able to do it without sentiment tracking.” — Kim Streitmatter, Analyst, True Food Kitchen
From dashboard to Friday’s regional call
Feedback only matters if it reaches the people who can act on it. True Food Kitchen built a cadence around that idea:
Every Wednesday, the team compiles a report on reviews, sentiment, trends, and wins, built as a four- to five-page presentation. It goes out to senior leadership, the entire ops team, regionals, area leaders, training, culinary, marketing, and the people team, so the whole organization stays aligned. Kim jokes that the only department left off the list is supply chain.
That report then feeds directly into a Friday regional call, giving the ops team a running start on the wins and pain points they’ll be tackling the following week. From there, the ops team distills the report into a Tuesday newsletter that reaches every operator, GM, and executive chef, closing the loop from corporate insight down to the location level.
Turning sentiment into a competition
True Food Kitchen translated Alchemer’s positive, neutral, and negative sentiment scoring into a simple one-through-three scale, then set a best-in-class benchmark for that score. Operators now have a real target tied to both the brand and their own location’s performance, and the metric doubles as a quarterly bonus kicker. Healthy competition, as Kim puts it, and a way to make sentiment feel as concrete as sales.
Not every insight comes from a complaint. During a recent promotion featuring three burgers created in-house by three of the brand’s own executive chefs, one chef’s take on a smash burger generated so much buzz that it came up at True Food Kitchen’s corporate town hall, with people asking if it was coming back full time. It’s the kind of signal that’s easy to miss in a sales report but impossible to miss in the reviews.
The business outcomes
Across both brands, the pattern holds: feedback that gets structured, routed, and acted on quickly changes outcomes.
- A seven-week menu reversal. True Food Kitchen caught a sentiment spike over the loss of its chopped salad and brought it back for the very next seasonal menu, informed by tag-level sentiment data rather than sales guesswork.
- A location-level equipment fix. Figaro’s diagnosed and corrected an oven temperature issue at a single location before it became a chain-wide reputation problem, based entirely on review patterns.
- A menu addition driven by guest feedback. Figaro’s added a gluten-free crust in direct response to allergy concerns raised in reviews.
- A near-total internal distribution loop. True Food Kitchen’s Wednesday-to-Friday-to-Tuesday reporting rhythm puts guest sentiment in front of nearly every department in the company, from culinary to the people team.
- Franchisee behavior change tied to revenue math. Figaro’s uses customer lifetime value calculations, not just star ratings, to get franchisee buy-in on responding to reviews.
- Faster response times. Figaro’s is piloting AI-assisted review responses to close the gap between a guest leaving feedback and the brand acknowledging it, a gap that matters more than most teams realize.
That last point isn’t a small one. Alchemer’s own research backs up why response speed and clarity carry so much weight with guests. Alchemer’s 2026 Quick-Service Restaurant Study: Winning the Cost-Conscious Diner found that today’s diners are more value-driven and less patient with friction than ever, a dynamic that makes every touchpoint, including how a brand responds to a review, part of the value equation.
It’s the same principle Figaro’s and True Food Kitchen are both leaning into: guests are more forgiving of a mistake than of being ignored. Simply responding to reviews can increase the likelihood that customers will change their star rating or review.
The bigger pattern
What Figaro’s and True Food Kitchen are doing mirrors what other multi-location brands have found working with Alchemer.
Reviews are an early warning system for operations, a menu focus group, and a franchisee accountability tool, all at once.
As True Food Kitchen and Figaro’s Pizza & Pizza Schmizza keep building on their programs, one thing is clear. The brands that treat guest feedback as a daily operational habit, not a quarterly report, are the ones catching problems before they spread and finding wins before they’re obvious anywhere else.
Listen to the whole conversation here.
Ready to see how Alchemer can help your multi-location brand turn reviews and sentiment into faster operational decisions? Request a demo to get started.