Red Robin Gourmet Burgers, a US restaurant chain, competes in a crowded market where customer tastes change rapidly. As such, the company must build an organization that can quickly change its customer experience to satisfy its shifting customer demands. To fulfill this vision, Red Robin employs Yammer, a social collaboration technology from Microsoft, to free the flow of information and knowledge within the company, improving its organizational agility. This report shows customer experience (CX) professionals how social technologies can play an instrumental role in helping the business respond to change as a matter of routine.
Red robin builds an agile customer-centric culture
1. For Customer Experience Professionals
Case Study: Red Robin Builds An Agile
Customer-Centric Culture With Yammer
The Restaurant Uses Social Tools To Engage Employees And
Accelerate Innovations That Customers Crave
by TJ Keitt
with John Dalton, Maxie Schmidt-Subramanian, and Curt Nichols
Why Read This Report
Red Robin Gourmet Burgers, a US restaurant chain, competes in a crowded market where customer tastes
change rapidly. As such, the company must build an organization that can quickly change its customer
experience to satisfy its shifting customer demands. To fulfill this vision, Red Robin employs Yammer, a social
collaboration technology from Microsoft, to free the flow of information and knowledge within the company,
improving its organizational agility. This report shows customer experience (CX) professionals how social
technologies can play an instrumental role in helping the business respond to change as a matter of routine.
Headquarters
Forrester Research, Inc., 60 Acorn Park Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02140 USA
Tel: +1 617.613.6000 • Fax: +1 617.613.5000 • w ww.forrester.com
June 20, 2014
organizational changes strengthen Red robin’s customer experience
Red Robin Gourmet Burgers claims three core competencies: customer experience, burgers, and
shakes. Chris Laping, the restaurant’s senior vice president (SVP) of business transformation and chief
information officer (CIO), says that another key capability buttresses these competencies: the ability to
drive change. Red Robin sits in a fickle market where customers’ culinary preferences can quickly shift,
requiring the restaurant to perceive and respond to these changes rapidly. To build customer-centric
responsiveness into the organization, Red Robin:
■ Married learning, operations, and technology management. In order to drive change, Steve Carley,
Red Robin’s chief executive officer, aligned learning and development, operations services, technology
management, and project management under Chris Laping in 2011. The first three groups handle the
people, restaurant processes, and technology changes, respectively. The project management office
orchestrates the changes across these groups to ensure continuity. Collectively, this group informs all
changes to the customer experience from employee uniforms to menus and customer-facing mobile apps.
■ Allowed change to come bottom-up instead of top-down. As head of business transformation, Chris
believes change is best enacted “where employees meet customers.” In order to do this, he needed to give
these employees — particularly the 22,000 team members working in the restaurants — a voice.1 One of
his early acts leading business transformation was to introduce Yammer, a social collaboration tool, to
Red Robin. The cloud-based technology is an important conduit for employees to report on customers’
impressions and recommend service and even menu changes to the corporate operations group.
■ Focused on getting workers invested in change. The youth of Red Robin’s workforce — 87% are Gen
Yers (those born between 1980 and 2000) — led Chris to seek technologies that he believed would
appeal to this younger demographic. While this is becoming a common response to the influx of Gen