The pandemic years of 2021 to 2022 were a deep winter for the restaurant industry. Whether a chain restaurant group or a small breakfast shop, everyone struggled. Wowprime Corp. Chairman Chen Cheng-hui said at this year's shareholders meeting that "last year was extremely difficult." Yet as a leader in Taiwan's restaurant industry, Wowprime moved quickly with strategy and embraced digital tools, and after a brief period of losses, successfully drove a rapid recovery in group performance. As Li Bi-shan, Director of Wowprime's Marketing Division 4, shared with us: "Dining is a deeply everyday industry. Because of the nature of this business, we need to know accurately and quickly what consumers' real experiences are, so we can make fast adjustments and meet customer needs."
The SurveyCake editorial team visited Wowprime's headquarters in Taichung to learn how the group uses digital tools like SurveyCake to quickly understand and consolidate the needs and feedback of customers and employees. Let's take a look.
From Paper to Digital: Systematically Managing Data Across 300 Stores While Dramatically Cutting Labor Costs
In recent years, the restaurant industry has moved aggressively toward digitalization. Wowprime began positioning itself well before the pandemic, embracing new digital technology. SurveyCake can be seen at work across the group's management and both internal and external communications.
In its early days, Wowprime surveyed dining satisfaction with paper questionnaires. After customers completed a survey in-store, staff would run card-reading analysis. This consumed significant labor, hardware, and management costs, including manual card reading, equipment maintenance, and reprinting whenever the questionnaire changed. Open-ended feedback from customers was also difficult to preserve.
"Customer opinions are a critical foundation for improving quality and service, so our stores carefully review customer feedback every single day," Director Li Bi-shan explained. For Wowprime, understanding the voice of the customer is essential to running a successful restaurant business. Faced with paper surveys that were hard to archive and analyze, the group committed in 2018 to adopting SurveyCake for fully digital management.
Today, every brand and store under Wowprime uses the SurveyCake system. A survey is always distributed to diners after their meal, collecting at least around two million customer feedback responses per year. It is easy to imagine the enormous manpower and resources Wowprime would have needed to process this volume of information before going digital.
Wowprime operates more than twenty restaurant brands, each with its own operating model. Behind this reality is a backend that must manage a very large number of surveys, and how surveys are managed directly affects data accuracy, downstream analysis, and decision-making. A professional, easy-to-use survey management tool is therefore essential.
"I really like SurveyCake's skip logic, question branching, and hidden question features," Director Li revealed. Digging deeper, we learned why: restaurants frequently change dishes and menus. When these plans are ready but not yet live, questions can be designed in the system in advance and switched on from the dashboard when the time comes, without redesigning the entire survey. This saves enormous time and labor.
Director Li also shared how SurveyCake's statistical charts support Wowprime's data analysis: "We do export customer feedback for our own analysis, but the SurveyCake dashboard already includes built-in Cross Tabulation and visual charts. These help our marketing staff see the distribution of collected feedback the moment it comes in. I find this extremely practical."
The SurveyCake dashboard generates statistical charts the moment responses arrive and provides Cross Tabulation, giving survey managers the fastest possible overview of response activity. Unlike typical online survey systems, SurveyCake offers advanced statistical analysis that lets managers systematically review massive datasets, dramatically improving confidence in collected data and analysis.
Using SurveyCake Integrations to Monitor Customers in Real Time and Respond Fast
Director Li shared Wowprime's secret to staying on top of customer sentiment: "Responses completed through SurveyCake are connected to our POS system with conditional alerts. If a customer's answer triggers a specific condition, SurveyCake sends an immediate notification. Counter staff in the store can quickly and intuitively see whether guests on-site are having a good experience, allowing us to respond promptly and smoothly at the first moment."
With paper satisfaction cards, stores had to rely on staff intuition to catch problems in the moment. SurveyCake's POS integration delivers conditional alerts instead, giving stores a digital way to observe with fine-grained precision and track customer sentiment in real time.
One Vision Across the Group: Full Digital Adoption, Administrative Efficiency Up More Than 50%
Wowprime's digital transformation is far from surface-level. Its success depends equally on employee buy-in and active support. Take the HR department: survey data collection spans three main areas, including intern activities, employee satisfaction, and training course information. Using SurveyCake, HR communication became more efficient and data collection quality rose to a new level, naturally earning employee support for the company's digital strategy.
HR Development Assistant Manager Lu Yu-hsin shared: "For employee satisfaction, we used to distribute paper forms to stores. From filling out to collection, the whole round trip took about half a month. Now, with the online approach, we reach a response rate of over 50% within about three days of sending out the survey."
Another expression of this speed and efficiency: Wowprime launched a talent development program in 2018. Information that once required phone calls and individual interviews can now be gathered easily through SurveyCake, cutting the complex operations and labor costs behind the scenes and making far better use of time.
Not a Cold Digital Transformation, but One with Warmth That Employees Can Feel
Digital transformation is not just about convenient data collection. By building real-time communication channels, it makes employees feel valued and heard.
Assistant Manager Lu noted that before online surveys, employees had to use very formal channels to voice opinions, which limited communication effectiveness. With SurveyCake in place, willingness to give feedback rose dramatically: "The communication channel built on SurveyCake lets us spread a positive culture. When colleagues feel the company genuinely wants to listen, and that feedback is actually reported up promptly with corresponding responses, everyone senses our commitment and becomes more willing to speak up."
SurveyCake's simple operation and human-centered design lower the response barrier to a minimum, creating a friendly, private, and painless environment for respondents. The result: collected data with high quality and real reference value, management that can genuinely hear employee voices and respond and adjust in real time, and a two-way communication culture that makes Wowprime a friendlier workplace.
Listening Attentively with Digital Tools, Living the "People First" Corporate Philosophy
"Since adopting SurveyCake, our efficiency in analysis and decision-making has improved, because we can collect customer reactions quickly, directly, and truthfully. SurveyCake also gives our consumers a reassuring, pressure-free response environment, helping us genuinely hear what customers want to express." Director Li firmly affirmed SurveyCake's indispensable role in listening and communication.
On the road ahead, Wowprime will continue to rely on SurveyCake's support to see the truest insights, make the most timely adjustments, and deliver experiences that fit consumers best.
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