Founders Re-Imagines their Brewery Experience with AnyRoad

Setting the Bar for Net Promoter Score: Founders Brewing and AnyRoad

28% increase in average monthly guests

A streamlined booking experience resulted in a significant visitor boost.

90% reduction in site event launch time

Improved administrator tools reduced time-to-launch for new experiences on the Founders website.

95 NPS Rating

With focused event management, Founders earned a best-in-class net promoter score.

Objective

Founded in 1997 in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Founders Brewing Company now operates out of two locations, Grand Rapids and Detroit. Founders has approximately 600 employees and product distribution across all 50 states and 20 countries internationally.

Founders’ brewery tour program started in 2012 with little more than a sign-in sheet and tour groups of 12 people. Over the years, the Founders team took their tour management program online over the years, but maintaining the system proved painfully manual.

Any time the team wanted to test a new tour concept, the team had to enlist design and development resources for the website, resulting in delays, frustrated staff, and an annoying customer experience.

Coupled with the fact that the management of visitor data and feedback was intensely manual and relied on Excel spreadsheets, business leaders had no way of knowing how the tour program was performing or how to adjust their program to convert visitors into brand ambassadors.

After partnering with AnyRoad in 2018, Founders began to reimagine and streamline their brewery experience program, uncovering key insights around new and repeat visitors, net promoter score (NPS), and ultimately the impact on revenue.

Founders worked with AnyRoad to establish their goals:

• Scale their infrastructure through an intuitive platform investment.
• Diversify their tour types and experiences.
• Create new tours through quick ideation and execution.

The Solution

Founders began using AnyRoad’s Experience Relationship Management (ERM) platform, finding that it was easy to use, provided granular visitor data, and allowed for more informed marketing and experience investment. Using AnyRoad Atlas and AnyRoad Experience Manager, Founders leveraged functionality, including:

• Direct visitor feedback, including NPS score and text sentiment analysis.
• Streamlined management of experiences and events – The ability to add, remove, or update tour and experience types quickly and easily.
• Established data capture of visitor emails and demographic data for remarketing.
• Centralized data and insights enabling consistent measurement and benchmarking across both locations.
• Specialized features for private events and experiences.

Results

Now operating on the AnyRoad platform, the Founders team has enjoyed many benefits of a more streamlined and focused event and experience management program, including:

• A best-in-class visitor Net Promoter Score (NPS) score of 95.
• A streamlined booking experience that resulted in a 28% increase in average monthly guests.
• Improved administrator tools that reduced time-to-launch for new experiences on foundersbrewing.com by 90%.
• Cost and efficiency improvements gained through data-driven planning for staffing and catering.
• Improved cross-departmental planning and collaboration with Sales, Marketing, Social Media, and Production.
• A growing first-party data set of brand champions and repeat visitors complete with email and demographic data.

“I believe that we will continue to utilize the insights received from AnyRoad to further elevate the Founders experience.” — John Gautraud | Founders Brewing Company