HACCP, Meet BECCP. The New Framework For Great Brand Experience

Throughout my career optimizing operations for restaurant brands, every executive I talk to wants a “silver bullet” to their brand’s success.

Early on, I used to think, “Well, that’s just fantasy.”

But over time, I saw patterns emerge from the numerous brands I worked with and slowly came to realize that a silver bullet does, in fact, exist. And it comes in the form of a framework that operationalizes all the elements that set your brand apart.

I call this framework Brand Experiential Critical Control Points, fashioned after HACCP (Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points) that we’re all familiar with.

While HACCP standardizes every step regarding food preparation (touching, handling, delivery etc.) to minimize the probability of someone getting sick, BECCP takes the same approach to maximize the probability of someone receiving the truest brand experience.

Both HACCP and BECCP use specific metrics to measure the successful execution of every critical control point, which are the make or break areas that will have the biggest impact on the guest experience.

Very often, if a brand is experiencing subpar satisfaction ratings, I recommend that they revisit their BECCP and see if they’ve missed any critical control point, and whether they’re measuring the success of each properly.

In this article, I’ll detail the following formula for establishing, maintaining, and improving great brand experiences.

1. Identify Your Brand Differentiators

There are an estimated 749,404 restaurants in the U.S. What makes someone choose you over others? Over cooking at home or meal services?

It boils down to the brand experience. Brand experience encompasses every interaction the customer has with your brand: food options, food quality, the ordering process, service, payment, post-experience survey, etc. All of these components make up the brand experience.

What component, along that entire user journey, sets your brand apart?

That will be your brand differentiator, the area you need to focus on.

For example, at PJ’s Coffee (one of Tattle’s partners), they make it abundantly clear on all their marketing material that their beignets are a key differentiator (they’re based in New Orleans, after all). So how could their entire brand experience be centered around that?

Here are some ideas:

• Offer flavor recommendations and drink pairings in the ordering process
• Have store members to recommend beignets when taking orders
• Offer free beignets samples in-store
• Attach free beignets to orders as part of a promotion
• Or an endless number of other possibilities!

In other words, take those differentiators and explode them across your brand. Highlight them in every way you can. This is the foundation of your BECCP framework.

2. Establish CCPs & Brand Standards

Once you’ve determined your key brand differentiator and how you want to serve it up to the customers, establish your Critical Control Points (CCPs).

Let’s say we had a coffee brand called Coffee & Co., which has a brand differentiator revolving around speed of service.

First, for the drive-thru ordering channel, a CCP might be “Waiting at the drive-thru menu” — after all, this is a part of the experience that allows Coffee and Co. to excel and separate from the competition.

Second, we implement a corresponding brand standard, such as “Drivers must have a 5 second wait or less before being greeted at the menu.“

Once it’s standardized, communicate it to all your corporate store GMs and franchisees and put it into practice.

For example, if you’ve decided to recommend beignets and drink pairing, make it part of the training manual that the cashier always offers recommendations and ask “would you like to try our signature beignets?” And that brand standard will be crucial to curating the brand experience.

3. Measure Adherence

Now that you have the brand standard for all your critical control points, it’s time to measure the output.

There are two ways this can be accomplished – and a two-pronged solution is necessary to really get a grasp on operational performance.

1. Performing routine internal audits
2. Collecting continual guest feedback

The former captures a snapshot in time, while the latter offers a stream of adherence data.

There’s another reason this approach is important: there’s a huge distinction between a GM/Franchisee fully adhering to brand standards and the guest perception of their experience.

Just because your restaurants adhere to the standards doesn’t guarantee the guest will be satisfied with their experience.

So, how do we collect this information?

For internal audits

Let’s say, for example, you have a pizza with a 10-step build. You can break that down into multiple “yes” or “no” questions and ask both groups the following:

1. Are all toppings included?
2. Is it baked correctly / Does the crust have the right color?
3. Is the sauce portion correct?
4. Is the pizza cut into the right number of slices?
5. Are all the slices fully cut through?

The answers to these questions help you determine to what extent are employees adhering to the brand standards, with 100% indicating that all expectations of the standards are met.

Guest feedback

You can use a platform like Tattle that allows you to collect real-time guest sentiment data across every ordering channel and operational category.

For surveys, you don’t have to get into the weeds with questions like you do with internal audits. You just need to make sure that guests are having positive experiences whever your CCPs are.

Tattle’s fast-paced survey have a 95% completion rate, which ensures your feedback velocity remains high, as well as your statistical sginificance. It’s a great platform for keeping tabs on your BECCP.

To measure the impact of a menu item’s execution (adherence to brand standards) on the overall guest experience, we use a metric called Operational Resilience. You can read more about this here.

4. Calibrate & Repeat

Once you have an initial data set and are able to understand where your restaurants stand with regard to CCPs, it’s time to review, refine, and repeat.

As part of the review process, most operators will be happy if brand standards are met and guest sentiment is high. However, exceptional operators will continually challenge the standards, asking the following in the review process:

To what extent does the adherence to standards at each step impact the overall brand experience? Or, to what extent do our brand standards even matter?

I love this particular question, because it allows operators to “cheat” a bit. After all, if offering five or three topping customization options doesn’t make a difference on the overall guest satisfaction, why not offer fewer to both reduce food cost, and ensure higher speed and accuracy?

These are the nuanced, strategic conversations that can come about when you have a framework like BECCP. You can’t get to this point unless you’ve first followed the process – otherwise, you’re actioning upon gut-hunches, which rarely produce good results.

I hope this helps you understand the importance of having BECCP, and the approach to effectively design, implement, and optimize one for your brand. If you’re interested in learning more about how we help 11,000+ restaurants improve their brand experience, feel free to reach out to our team here.