Wagamama
20 years of partnership with HGEM
Wagamama's Story
wagamama was inspired by fast-paced, Japanese ramen bars. The first restaurant opened in London's Bloomsbury in 1992, as wagamama set out to create a unique way of eating, bringing the fresh, nourishing flavours of Asia to all. Now with around 200 restaurants both in the UK and major cities worldwide, wagamama continues to be driven by kaizen - a Japanese philosophy based on continuous improvement that we share here at HGEM.
Our Journey with wagamama
We have been proud to be part of the wagamama journey since 2004, refining how we work together and building a stronger partnership, day-by-day. Working closely together with the iconic restaurant has influenced the development of our Guest Experience Management platform – The Hub - just as the experiential data that we have provided to wagamama over the years has guided and shaped wagamama into the brand it is today.
We continue to maintain a close relationship with wagamama’s insight team to maintain the spirit of kaizen – always looking for what more we can do to enhance knowledge and understanding of the guest experience.
Wagamama goals
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Understanding experience influencers
Internally, a primary goal for wagamama is to really understand how guests perceive their experience and what factors influence this. It's also about making a distinction between the different channels - eat-in, delivery and collection - each of which has its own unique customer journey and challenges.
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Food
Food is at the heart of the wagamama experience, so being able to view dish-level statistics is vital to supporting both innovation of new dishes and the impact of any changes to ingredients or cooking processes.
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Service
Beyond the food, guests know and love unique wagamama service style. So it's vital for brand consistency to have a way of monitoring that teams are delivering service in the right way every time, as well as taking advantage of opportunities to increase sales.
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Single Guest View
Finally, a key goal is to amplify guest insights by integrating feedback and ratings onto guest profiles on wagamama's CRM, enabling enhanced segmentation and personalisation of communications.
Solutions
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Integrated Guest Feedback
At the core of wagamama's solution is a suite of fully branded guest feedback surveys, which 10,000+ guests per month are invited to complete via channels such as email or QR code. Each survey reflects a key guest journey and uses personalisation by pre-populating known fields. Key measures are fed into to wagamama's CRM to enhance marketing segmentation.
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Product Ratings
Most wagamama surveys present an image-based menu and the ability to capture ratings and comments on individual dishes and drinks. This helps the kitchen and food development teams to monitor changing perceptions, not just on the dishes themselves but also on other factors such as value for money. One survey is dedicated to evaluating innovative new dishes at wagamama's noodle lab.
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Mystery Guest Audits
Wagamama service steps are periodically and objectively audited in each restaurant, through eat-in, delivery and collection channels. These are closely aligned with the way the team is trained to deliver a consistent service and recognise opportunities to increase spend per head.
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Review Management
A useful tool for monitoring and managing all reviews across the estate in one platform, including drawing insights from trends and patterns.
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Manager Engagement
Wagamama has very high engagement by managers, who use HGEM's Hub to monitor surveys and audits, and to perform analysis on the results. They also receive weekly and monthly summary reports highlighting strengths and weaknesses. To reinforce internal communications, wagamama's Hub platform has bespoke branding. They call it 'satoru', meaning 'to know' or 'understand'.
Results
Over the many years of working together, HGEM solutions have formed an integral part of how wagamama manages and improves customer experience.
We record around 25,000 guest experience interactions per month, through audits and feedback.
Wagamama teams have excellent awareness of the tools they have at their disposal and are very active users of the The Hub, with around 100,000 page views recorded per month.
Being hyper-focused on guest experience has been fruitful for wagamama, as the brand demonstrated a strong track record of like-for-like revenue growth with 228 consecutive weeks trading ahead of the market, pre-pandemic. Over this period, the annual like-for-like growth was 9.6% on average, which equates to 8.5% points ahead of the market, according to the Coffer-Peach tracker.
A recent example of a project we supported wagamama with was a major review of how they recruit, train and communicate with team members. We also improved the way we communicated key customer metrics to teams and managers, alongside running a series of workshops to help them understand what they can do to enhance the guest experience. By the end of the project, NPS had increased by 12 points and a similar rise was seen in Google review ratings.
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We have a strong, collaborative relationship with HGEM, whom have been an integral partner to wagamama for almost 20 years. Their tools and support have become a core part of our business, enabling us to drive the best insights from both our guest surveys and mystery audits programmes, ensuring we can deliver the best guest experience possible.
Hannah Holmes | Director of Insight and Strategy
