Customer Story
How Sydney restaurant group drove 33x ROI from SMS feedback surveys
Overview
Challenge: Wison Group needed a better way to capture guest feedback after dining and turn that post-visit engagement into reviews, loyalty and repeat business.
Solution: Sinch Engage enabled the business to send SMS feedback surveys after customer visits, gather insights quickly and use that interaction to support repeat patronage and online reviews.
Results: A campaign cost of about $410 generated an estimated $13,600 in return revenue, around 33x ROI, while also lifting TripAdvisor reviews and engaging 23.9% of patrons.
“It’s just about managing the guest feedback, or the negative feedback and turning it into a positive where we can. SMS helped us do that.“
For Wilson Group, feedback was never just about collecting opinions. It became a way to improve the guest experience, build stronger reviews and bring diners back again. As the parent company behind restaurants including The Chambers and Ollie’s Italian in Cairns, the business was dealing with a tough hospitality environment after COVID. With international tourism gone and customer expectations higher than ever, attracting locals and turning them into regulars became essential.
The group had already tried gathering feedback in person and through third-party booking platforms, but those methods did not convert well. Face-to-face requests made honest responses less likely, while third-party emails felt generic and were easy to ignore in a crowded inbox. Leith Wilson believed SMS would work better because it felt more personal and immediate, and because customers already had their phones in hand.
Working with Sinch Engage (formerly MessageMedia), Wilson Group created an automated SMS feedback flow sent after a patron dined. Guests were asked to respond with a simple number rating. Positive scores were then guided toward leaving a public review through a direct link, while lower scores triggered personal follow-up calls from the team so issues could be understood and addressed directly.
Turning guest feedback into stronger reviews
This process gave Wilson Group a practical way to manage reviews and recover poor experiences before they turned into lasting damage. It also helped the team build a more consistent customer journey, where feedback could be acted on quickly instead of disappearing into a generic survey inbox. Leith Wilson said SMS helped the group manage negative feedback and turn it into a positive where possible.
The business results were meaningful. Ollie’s moved from a 3.9-star Google rating to 4.3 stars based on reviews generated through SMS feedback requests. A venue that had once averaged two reviews a month was now generating 12–15 five-star reviews per month, while The Chambers was receiving 6–8 reviews monthly. Wilson Group also found that 30% of people leaving reviews came back weekly, while 60–70% returned once a month. The process delivered a reported 33x ROI for Ollie’s and helped create more dependable repeat patronage at a time when locals had become the business’s core audience.
