Customer Experience

By adaptive - March 5th, 2014

Restaurant.com is the US's largest dining deals site, offering more than 50,000 deals at thousands of restaurants nationwide.

Restaurant.com President and Chief Marketing Officer Christopher Krohn oversees the growth and development of the nation’s largest restaurant deals site. With direct oversight of the company’s information technology and marketing teams, Krohn is focused on optimizing the consumer experience to drive the business and brand forward. A veteran e-commerce leader, Krohn has extensive experience scaling businesses and cultivating strong consumer-facing brands and teams.

Prior to joining Restaurant.com, Krohn served as the chief marketing officer and vice president of business development at Whitney Automotive Group marketing the business’ multiple consumer-facing brands. He also has served in key marketing leadership roles at Harrah’s Entertainment and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, building consumer loyalty and brand equity.

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ckrohn1

What are the key drivers behind your organization’s use of social media? 

At Restaurant.com, our focus is on three main areas in a specific priority order. Our first priority in social media is engaging with our customers in a fun, thoughtful, and entertaining way that builds our brand. Second, we focus on customer service. It’s important to listen to what customers are saying directly to a brand and the overall sentiment about your brand and respond to every customer in a timely manner.

Last, we focus on direct sales from social media. At Restaurant.com, we treat it as a support channel that assists in driving sales. This is most important in an organization is to ensure alignment within the marketing team on the value social media drives. It may not be the top direct sales channel, but we see examples every day where social media saves customers, acquires new customers, and engages customers beyond just a sale. 

How is social media organised within your company? What organisational models do you use and why?

Social media technically sits within the marketing team, but we ensure close connection with the customer service team and welcome employees to post about our brand and products. We have social media guidelines for employees that direct them to always disclose their affiliation with the company to ensure authenticity.

As a corporate user of social networks, how does your company value the networks it has a presence on? 

Based on Restaurant.com’s focus on our key demographic - moms ages 35-55, we have strategically placed Facebook as the hub of our social media efforts. We integrate our messages with Pinterest and Twitter as well to reach “her”. 

In our B2B marketing efforts, LinkedIn places a central role as a lead generation channel using Twitter to support.

Can you outline a recent initiative that included a social media component? 

In January, we launched Restaurant.com’s 2014 Restaurant Food Trends campaign, which was an integrated 360-degree marketing effort. We launched the content with a press release and email campaign, and support this initiative with a social media campaign that highlighted each of the food trends throughout the month of January. This also included a blogger program and a content strategy on our consumer blog, The Dish.

How much pressure is there to show ROI with the social media you use?

We measure the impact of social media differently than other marketing channels. Because we focus on customer service and brand engagement, we measure KPI’s that are consistent with those objectives. We focus on the number of engagements with our content, number of customers we assist, and the overall virality of our social content in addition to the tradition digital marketing channel KPI’s. We do measure the visits, conversion, AOV, and direct revenue through the social media channel, but these are not the metrics we use to measure the effectiveness of the social media channel.  

How did your organisation approach the mapping of your enterprise to identify where social media should reside in the corporate structure?

In the corporate structure, we are an entrepreneurial organization with a flat hierarchy. There isn’t a debate about where social media should reside. 

What is your advice to organisations that are beginning to map their own corporate structure with the view to embedding social media activity within their enterprise?

Don’t start with the corporate structure; start with the customer. Focus your social media efforts around listening to and engaging with customers first and communicating those messages that you want to communicate second. Organizationally, the specific unit you place social media is less important than ensuring that the social media team is able to work as a customer focused function.

Are there any specific tools you employ that help your business manage its social media activity across multiple departments?

We use HootSuite to assist with monitoring and responding on Twitter and we use Wildfire by Google for monitoring, notifications or alerts and publishing content. These tools help us connect with customer service to ensure a timely response to customers. Also, the publishing tool helps us collectively build social media content between the social media team members. Additionally, we use Email Management tool, Right Now, to manage customer questions from social media directly to customer service via an email address. 

How do you see the management and development of social media in your company evolving over the next few years?

We are pushing right now to integrate social into all aspects of our customer relationships. This involves connecting with the customer’s social graph, and integrating that social graph into both our marketing communications and our e-commerce offerings. We call this “socially integrated commerce,” and the promise of this approach is that it enables our brand to become part of the customer’s world, and hence more relevant and compelling.  

When customers are considering a dining occasion, we want to be a trusted friend that they connect with before, during, and afterwards. So that while they are searching for a restaurant, planning their meal, enjoying the meal, reviewing it afterwards, and reminiscing about it later, Restaurant.com is there with them every step of the way. This is a challenging vision to achieve, but given our mission of connecting diners with great restaurants, it motivates us to excellence in social commerce.