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Costa Vida digitally collecting customer reviews

December 12, 2013

In an effort to gain feedback from customers, Costa Vida Fresh Mexican Grill implemented Mindshare Technologies' customer review product, OpenTell. Over a six-month period, Costa Vida used the social advocacy technology to aggregate, post and share authenticated, real-time reviews from customers, according to a company press release. Across the 54 Costa Vida locations throughout North America, customers universally gave the brand 20 percent higher satisfaction scores than at non-authenticated review sites.

Through its patent-pending product OpenTell, Mindshare Technologies, a provider of cloud-based Voice of the Customer solutions, helps Costa Vida collect nearly 40,000 customer reviews across participating locations throughout North America, said Jeff Jacobson, chief operating officer of Costa Vida.

"We were getting great customer feedback through Mindshare's VoC program and wanted to promote the experiences our customers were having," said Jeff Jacobson, chief operating officer of Costa Vida. "Infrequent reviews on sites like Yelp! and Google cause customer feedback to go stale, not to mention the fact that there is no verification that the post was from an actual customer. We feel these sites often don't provide an accurate representation of the great experiences our customers are having every day. OpenTell proved that theory to be true."

Highlights from the program include:

• On average, Costa Vida locations using OpenTell received 105 reviews per month, compared to less than one per month from Yelp!
• The average age of the most recent review on OpenTell was 2 days, compared to an average of more than three months on other review sites.
• Using OpenTell, Costa Vida averaged customer satisfaction ratings of about 90 percent across all locations, compared to 75 percent on other review sites where reviews could not be authenticated.
• By publishing unfiltered Mindshare review data from real customers on OpenTell, Costa Vida averaged overall satisfaction ratings nearly one full star higher on a 5-star scale than other review sites.
• And the potential for fraud was greatly reduced as OpenTell allows only actual paying customers with unique customer survey codes to post feedback.

"Costa Vida proved that OpenTell can elevate a company's responsiveness to its customers in unprecedented ways," said John Sperry, Mindshare CEO. "The product helps brands improve their online reputations by leveraging their most valuable asset — their satisfied customers. Consumers today expect greater transparency and more conversational relationships with businesses. OpenTell is a significant step in facilitating this fundamental shift in the nature of customer engagement."

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