Wendy’s embraces social media to learn from customers
Teen’s tweet and 3.6 million retweets become sensation.
DUBLIN — Brand awareness via social media is a new thing for many companies.
Wendy’s program, however, received some serious validation this year — and it only cost the company some chicken nuggets.
Carter Wilkerson, a Nevada teen and chicken-nugget fan, became a Twitter sensation earlier this year with his now-famous tweet, “Yo @Wendys how many retweets for a year of free chicken nuggets.”
He directed it to Wendy’s for one reason — the company’s reputation on social media.
“It’s Wendy’s, I figured they would respond,” Wilkerson told a crowd of Wendy’s employees this month at the company’s Dublin headquarters during a rally staged as part of the company’s founder’s week.
The rest of the story is wellknown. Wendy’s told Wilkerson that he needed 18 million retweets. It was an arbitrary, absurd number, and Wilkerson came nowhere near it, yet he has gotten more than 3.6 million retweets, the record for a single tweet. And the quest became a media sensation, resulting in numerous interviews and appearances on TV shows including “The Today Show” and “Ellen.”
The national exposure didn’t cost Wendy’s a dime, if you don’t count Wilkerson’s free nuggets for a year.
It also provides further evidence that the burger chain knows what it’s doing in the social-media world.
“I travel all over the country and speak to businesses, and people always ask me, ‘Who is the best at Twitter?’” said Nina Mishkin, a lead brand content strategist at Twitter. “The honest answer is Wendy’s.”
Mishkin rolled through a number of Wendy’s Twitter victories, including takedowns of Hardees and Jack In the Box, but also noted that the company isn’t engaging at random.
“They don’t just talk at you,” she said. “What the smarter brands do is create conversations, not just pushing content, but connecting.”
The notion isn’t really so new. Social media, including Twitter and Facebook, have given people a path to engage with brands for years.
“People have been doing this for a long time,” she said, noting that Wendy’s has been tweeted at since at least 2010.
Wendy’s engages on social media for much more serious purposes than tweaking rivals. To make use of it, the company brought its entire customer-serice team in-house, ditching third-party call centers and franchise-by-franchise hotlines.
The reason was to harness the power of social media channels to engage with customers, collect data and provide feedback, and help franchisees.
That effort began in 2014 when Frank Leary, whose 36-year career started on the grill at Wendy’s store No. 1, became vice president of customer experience, a new position at the time. One of his first tasks was to see how its third-party call center functioned. Not well, he said.
“Within 10 seconds of listening in on the first call, I had to take over,” Leary said. He knew the franchisee who owned the store the unhappy caller was at, so he called him and had the issue resolved on-site. “That doesn’t happen with a third-party call center. It was the spark.”
He told upper management that he could build his own team, take the operation in-house and improve everything about the customer experience. Wendy’s tested his idea for months before rolling out across its entire system.
Leary has about 16 people working between phones, social media, texts and even good old snail mail.
“We still get about 20 letters a day,” he said. Compare that to about 10,000 mentions a week on Twitter.
“And on Twitter, we need to and we get to respond within seconds,” said Corey Wetherby, one of the customer-service specialists as he monitored multiple Twitter and Facebook channels.
Bringing the customer service center in-house has made a big difference, said franchisee Zane Gross, who owns 63 Wendy’s stores from Akron to South Bend, Indiana. With the old call center, Gross received less than one piece of feedback per store every month, he said. Now, he gets more than five lines of feedback per store per month.
It isn’t all complaints either, which is all the call center could provide. Gross and his team also trust the feedback much more than before.
“The people manning that call center know us,” Gross said. “They know us personally, they know our system and operations, they are Wendy’s.”
No matter how a customer reaches out to Wendy’s, the company has a human in Dublin, Ohio, to talk to. Wetherby said customers frequently ask where he is, and some don’t believe him. There is even an employee who speaks Spanish to handle messages from Wendy’s locations in South America.
“The consumer today is so much more savvy, they have high expectations,” Gross said.