Blogs, Insights
Jonathan Taylor is an Operations Manager at Peach Pubs.
Every week, he used to spend 45 minutes pulling together performance reports, filtering dashboards, cross-referencing scores, building a picture of what was happening across his sites. Now it takes him 10 minutes.
The difference is not a new spreadsheet or a better report template. It is that his dashboard started thinking for him.
When Halo launched in October 2025, it could do things no other platform in hospitality was offering.
Operators could ask it a question in plain English – what’s driving complaints in Birmingham, how have review scores shifted this quarter, compare these three venues – and get a clear, evidence-backed answer in seconds. It could generate full performance reports in a conversation.
It could also write review responses in an operator's own brand tone of voice and auto-respond at scale, with timing controls that keep replies within business hours and add a natural delay so every response feels like it came from a real person.
That was a strong starting position. But it was just the foundation.
Over the following months, Halo changed significantly. Not in what it looked like, but in what it could do without being asked. The original platform was powerful, but it still waited for an operator to open it, type a question, and interpret the answer. The updates that followed were designed to close that gap.
If you manage multiple sites, you know the feeling: you cannot be everywhere. You rely on reports, check-ins, and gut instinct to decide where to focus your attention this week. Often, by the time you spot a problem in the data, it has been building for weeks.
Halo now changes that equation. The moment an operator opens The Hub, Halo analyses the data in the current view and surfaces the five most important things worth acting on. Not a summary of everything. The movements that actually matter: the steepest score declines, shifts in guest sentiment, patterns you would miss scanning a dashboard manually. It tells you which sites need attention before your next visit, not after.
Each insight comes with the evidence behind it and a recommended action. Not “your NPS dropped” but “NPS at your Birmingham site fell 12 points since March, driven by a spike in negative mentions of wait times at the bar.”
And Halo does not stop at the symptom. It traces the thread through multiple levels – wait-time complaints correlate with abnormal kitchen throughput on Friday and Saturday evenings – and lands on a specific recommendation: investigate the evening kitchen workflow.
The introduction of HGEM's HALO AI agent has made it incredibly easy to request deep-dive analysis and commentary on customer sentiment and specific touchpoints of the customer experience. Instead of spending time combing through data, we get instant, high-level summaries that are much quicker than doing the legwork ourselves. The insights provided have given us clear, data-driven actions to move forward with.
"How am I doing compared to others?"
Most operators can answer that question eventually. The benchmarking data exists. The problem is that it usually lives in a separate report, pulled quarterly, reviewed in a meeting, and forgotten by the following week. It is not part of the daily workflow.
Halo now surfaces those comparisons as part of its analysis, across mystery visit scores, NPS and review scores, without the operator needing to pull a separate report or ask the right question. It appears automatically in dashboard insights and whenever an operator asks a comparison question directly.
The effect is context. A score in isolation is just a number. A score relative to your competitive set is a strategic signal. It tells you whether you are gaining ground or losing it, and where.
Insight is only valuable if it leads to action. One of the most time-consuming actions in guest experience management is responding to feedback – reading each comment, understanding the sentiment, crafting a reply that is personal, professional, and proportionate.
Halo now generates responses across both reviews and guest feedback surveys. On any response where the guest has consented to contact, Halo analyses the comment and produces editable draft responses. Each one reflects the sentiment of what was said, acknowledges the specific themes raised, and varies meaningfully. Different openings, different emphasis, different balance of empathy and action.
Short positive comments get shorter responses. Detailed complaints get fuller, more thoughtful ones. None of them quote the guest's words back to them. All of them are fully editable before sending. The drafts are a starting point, not a replacement for human judgement – they remove the blank-page problem and speed up guest recovery from days to hours.
A good insight with no follow-through is just noise. One of the most common problems in multi-site hospitality is the gap between identifying an issue and making sure someone acts on it. The report gets read. The problem gets discussed. And then it drifts.
Halo-generated action plans are now assigned to a named person – the GM at Birmingham, the area manager covering the south-east – with a deadline and progress tracking built in.
The insight does not sit in a weekly summary waiting for someone to notice it. It becomes a task with an owner, a date, and accountability.
This is where it gets interesting.
An operator can see the problem, understand the root cause, and assign someone to fix it. But the question that usually follows is: is it worth the investment?
Halo can now project the likely outcome of operational changes before they are made. Not a guess. A quantified prediction based on the data.
That is not a hunch dressed up as a business case. It is a projection the board can evaluate. For operators who need to justify investment in training, staffing, or process changes, this turns a conversation about cost into a conversation about return.
I could have taken this straight to the board to show, 'This is what we're talking about, and here's the fact'. It's brilliant.
Guest experience has always been measurable. Now, for the first time, it is predictable.
In October 2025, Halo could answer questions about your data. Today, it reads your dashboard automatically, traces root causes through multiple levels, benchmarks you against peers, drafts responses to guest feedback, assigns accountability for action plans, and predicts the likely outcome of operational changes before they are made.
That is eight months of progress. And the roadmap is not slowing down.
