Case Study: Wendy’s achieves +8% total sales and higher breakfast satisfaction with Service Management Group (SMG)

By revamping training + improving morning service, Wendy’s earns a seat at the breakfast table

Wendy’s faced the challenge of rolling out a new nationwide breakfast program in March 2020 amid the operational disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic. To manage the complexity and measure performance, Wendy’s partnered with Service Management Group (SMG) to add breakfast questions to their CX survey, create a breakfast-specific reporting dashboard for real-time executive tracking, and deploy a required “breakfast team” training certification for front-line staff.

SMG used QSR benchmarks, product-level analysis and text analytics to identify poorly performing breakfast items and the ingredients driving negative feedback, then helped Wendy’s form a Low Performance Challenge Team of 70 bottom-performing locations to focus on accuracy, taste and speed while reinforcing training compliance. As a result — and with SMG’s ongoing reporting — Wendy’s saw measurable gains: +4 percentage points in Breakfast Overall Satisfaction (higher where training completion was greater), +5 points in Likelihood to Order Item Again, and an +8% lift in total sales.

Wendy's

Carl Loredo

Chief Marketing Officer