Robinson’s, family brewers in Stockport for 175 years, have taken a fresh approach to addressing standards within their retail pub estate by engaging with ‘secret agents’ to get a more accurate feel for their customers and their pubs.
Following the success of a similar mystery customer in June last year, Robinsons are once again rolling out a plan aimed at improving pub retail standards using their customers as ‘agents’ and rewarding them for their feedback.
The innovative Perfect Pubs programme has already provided valuable feedback and is set to be rolled out across all 340 pubs in the North West.
Director of Marketing David Bremner explains:
“We looked at the market and how others do
things and saw there was a way to do things
differently.
“We have segmented our estate into
7 trading types for a few years now and we
wanted to make sure we were measuring the
things most important to each.
” Working with our partner ‘bemyeyes’, we
worked from a bank of 150 questions to pick the
50 most appropriate to each segment and then
weighted them accordingly.
“These are, in turn, split into 10 experiences of
the pub visit such as –
Roadside Appeal,
Initial Impressions,
Bar Service,
Toilets
External Areas.”
The family brewer then decided they would use
real customers to do the measuring for them.
David continues:
“The take up has been fantastic. We advertised the programme within our pubs and on our web site and have quickly grown to 650 ‘agents’, each of who gives us valuable feedback including:
how far they will travel, what sort of pubs they like and how often they’d like to help us out.
“What we get at the end is real feedback from target customers; feedback is uploaded to the website, weighting the positive and negative feedback so that we can quickly address areas of excellence or concern with our licensees.”
The Perfect Pubs programme has also proved to be a successful marketing promotion. The ‘agents’ are each allocated £15 and a mission based upon their profile:
“We have generated new customers for our pubs from this programme, many of whom take friends and family and spend far more than the £15 the agent receives. CAMRA members have been a great help, we have our pensioners on board and we now also have staff from the brewery going out and seeing the sharp end of our business- it’s been a great success.”
The brewery hopes to complete 3 missions per year for each pub so they can track how individual pubs compare over time and where they sit in relation to their peers within their trading type. Where necessary, the brewery can quickly provide the tools to make improvements using the brewery’s new £3m training centre.
Robinson’s Perfect Pub ‘Myerscough’ scored 100%
David continued:
“Some licensees aren’t natural trainers; we can deliver training either in the training centre or in the pub. The Perfect Pubs report gives us a great training agenda tailored to each pub! Delivering great service and retail standards is essential to driving up sales and competing with the best managed, tenanted or free houses in any given area – it’s an area we all have to focus on in tough times. But when you combine a motivated entrepreneur with great results we all see growth.”
Robinsons have used this tool to help new licensees and to keep an eye on pub investments; future plans may include inclusion in awards programmes.
From the initial phase, over 25% of Robinsons’ pubs have scored over 90% and five pubs so far have scores of 100% – real Perfect Pubs!