Case Study: Darden Restaurants achieves 400% faster email response and scalable CRM rollout with Astute ePowerCenter

After seeing success with Astute's CRM, Darden expands the relationship across its portfolio of recognizable brands

Darden Restaurants, whose Olive Garden brand saw a 20% spike in contact center volume after launching a web-based customer comment form, struggled with manual processing of voice-of-customer data. The company had an existing relationship with Astute—having first selected Astute’s ePowerCenter CRM in 2001—and turned to Astute again to streamline feedback capture and improve contact center efficiency.

Astute implemented its ePowerCenter CRM to automate customer feedback capture, provide threshold alerts and configurable routing, and deliver built-in reporting. The solution improved Olive Garden’s email response time by 400%, allowed the guest relations team to handle far more interactions with only a 12% staff increase, enabled proactive outreach to 24,000 contacts within hours, reduced agent turnover, and led Darden to expand Astute’s CRM across multiple brands in 2010.

Darden Restaurants

Jan Tarnowski

System Administrator