See how A&W captures 25% increase in 5-star reviews on Google in six months

See how A&W partnered with Alchemer (formerly Chatmeter) to boost its online reputation and create greater trust and loyalty to strategically grow its brand and improve its overall customer experience.

“We have been using Alchemer (formerly Chatmeter) at a higher level. Whenever a franchisee wants to open a new location, we look at Alchemer reviews, participation on the platform, and whether the store managers are trained on Alchemer. This is part of our scorecard that determines whether they can open a new location.”

— A&W spokesperson

About A&W

As one of America’s iconic fast-food chains, A&W Restaurants has a long and storied past. Launched in 1919 with a California roadside root beer stand, the business became famous for serving up frosty mugs of foamy root beer.

Now, over a century after serving their first mug, A&W boasts hundreds of locations across the U.S. and revenues of over $330 million. Today, A&W Restaurants has its feet firmly planted in the present when it comes to the keen business decisions required to grow. With so many locations to manage, the company is laser-focused on elevating the customer experience and applying insights from consumer data to drive business strategy.

Challenge

In A&W’s highly competitive industry where searches for “food open now” have increased 210% over the past year, the company consistently lost out to competitors by not appearing in online search results.

To do so, they set three key goals:

1. Claim all listings to improve “near me” search accuracy
2. Increase online visibility and search rankings with optimized local SEO strategies
3. Glean customer insight and boost loyalty by responding to reviews as consistently and quickly as possible A&W knew they needed to understand consumer sentiment to inform and validate their business decisions.

They also wanted to become a more data-driven organization at every level of the company seeking actionable recommendations that would have a positive impact across all their locations.

“We want to train our teams to use Chatmeter as a reward system. So that when customers leave positive reviews our store managers can leverage that to inspire and reward their people.”

— A&W spokesperson

Solution

In search of an effective solution and—possibly, more importantly—a partner who could help them drive more foot traffic to their stores, A&W turned to Alchemer (formerly Chatmeter).

Alchemer’s Listings and Review management software allow businesses to:

Easily update all local business listings
Monitor and track review quality and quantity
Understand and measure the competitive landscape
Quickly reply to reviews with custom templates and bulk response

A&W realized that investing in a high-quality and efficient local SEO and review management solution would help them better understand the online and offline customer experience at their franchised locations. They could also easily claim, clean, and optimize local business listings to ensure consistency and accuracy across all their locations.

Key Outcomes

After just four months with Alchemer (formerly Chatmeter), A&W saw significant results.

• 12% increase in Page-1 appearances on Yelp
• 15% increase in Page-1 appearances on Google
• 13% increase in click to call actions on Google

A&W was thrilled to see their five-star reviews on Google increase by 25% and
their listing accuracy by 36%. Their review response rates also went up by 34%.

25 %

increase in five-star reviews on Google

36 %

increase in listings accuracy

34 %

increase in review response rate

A&W’s reputation data leads to actionable insight

While the improvements in their review and listing management were important to A&W, one of the real boons of working with Alchemer was better access to data and information. “There have been a number of times we’ve been able to get actionable insights,” said an A&W spokesperson. “We had one location in a busy area that was struggling. We were able to determine through Alchemer that customers didn’t like the parking lot. It looked overgrown and trashed and made the store appear closed.”

With that information, A&W worked with the store operator who repaired the parking lot blacktop and landscaping. Without access to local reviews, A&W may have never discovered why that location wasn’t performing well.

Improving the customer experience at scale

In partnership with Alchemer, A&W successfully surfaced unseen customer experiences across the enterprise. Along with award-winning support and industry-leading solutions, A&W can now make better informed strategic decisions, and new opportunities to strengthen their brand both at a location and organizational level.

In this article