In this exclusive CanadianSME Small Business Magazine interview, Sarah Beckett, Vice President of Sales & Marketing at Intouch Insight, shares how she helps multi-location brands turn customer experience data into clear, value-added insights that drive real operational change. Drawing on her background leading B2B sales and marketing teams in fast-growing tech and services companies, she explains how a tightly aligned go‑to‑market strategy, grounded in continuous industry research—especially in restaurant and retail—enables Intouch Insight to support brands in understanding evolving customer expectations and translating those learnings into growth.
You lead both sales and marketing at Intouch Insight, with a front-row seat to what’s happening in restaurants and retail—what are brands consistently underestimating when it comes to customer experience right now?
What many brands still underestimate is that customer experience is shaped just as much by human behaviours as by operational performance. We discovered this in our latest On-Premises Study, where the industry posted strong numbers on overall satisfaction and order accuracy, but the biggest gaps were in friendliness, greetings, and parting remarks. In other words, brands are getting the transaction mostly right, but too often missing the emotional layer that makes a customer experience memorable.
That matters because customers do not experience a visit as a checklist. They experience it as a feeling, a memory. A quick greeting, eye contact, or a warm handoff can change how long a wait feels and how valued a guest feels. Brands often invest heavily in efficiency, but they overlook the micro-moments that shape trust, loyalty, and word of mouth. Today, the real opportunity is not choosing between speed and service. It is delivering both consistently.
Many multi-location brands are getting faster and more automated, but not necessarily better—where do you see the biggest gap between operational efficiency and genuine human connection, and how does that gap show up in loyalty and repeat visits?
The biggest gap I see is when brands optimize the transaction but neglect the relationship. Automation can absolutely make experiences faster and more convenient, but if the human touch disappears, the experience can start to feel cold or interchangeable. That is where loyalty begins to erode.
In our research, we’ve seen that perceived speed matters almost as much as actual speed. When guests felt service was slower than expected, overall satisfaction dropped sharply, even if the delay itself was not dramatic. What often closes that gap is not just shaving off seconds. It is acknowledgement, clarity, friendliness, and confidence from frontline staff.
Customers are surprisingly forgiving when employees make them feel seen. They are far less forgiving when an experience feels efficient but impersonal. Over time, that affects repeat visits because loyalty is not built only on convenience. It is built on trust, ease, and the sense that a brand values your time and your business.
Your work ties frontline behaviours—like greetings, eye contact, suggestive selling, and accuracy—to measurable revenue outcomes; what are some of the most common missed revenue opportunities you see at the store level that could be fixed with simple behavioural shifts?
At the store level, some of the most common missed revenue opportunities are actually very simple. The first is suggestive selling. In our latest On-Premises Study, suggestive sell performance was the weakest frontline behaviour measured, which tells us many brands are leaving easy incremental revenue on the table.
The second is attentiveness during the handoff. When employees are engaged, they are more likely to confirm the order, catch errors, and create confidence in the experience. That protects both satisfaction and future spend. Even a minor mistake can turn a good transaction into a disappointing one, especially when food quality or accuracy is affected.
The good news is that these are coachable behaviours. A better greeting, a natural upsell, confirming a customization, or ending with a warm thank-you does not require a major system overhaul. Those small shifts can improve conversion, raise ticket size, and make the customer more likely to come back.
As automation and AI play a bigger role in ordering, payments, and operations, how should operators rethink the role of frontline staff so that technology enhances hospitality instead of eroding it?
As AI and automation expand, the role of frontline staff becomes more important, not less. Technology should take friction out of the experience, but people should still own the moments that require empathy, reassurance, and hospitality.
What we are seeing in our Emerging Experiences work is that automation can improve efficiency and even free employees to focus on higher-value interactions. For example, Voice AI outperformed traditional benchmarks on speed and still supported strong friendliness at pickup. But the same research also showed that human support is still essential, especially when customization, confusion, or exceptions arise.
So the goal should not be to replace hospitality with technology. It should be to reposition staff around the moments that matter most: greeting the guest, solving problems, personalizing the interaction, and making the experience feel seamless. The brands that win will be the ones that use technology to remove friction while empowering employees to add warmth.
Intouch Insight’s annual studies measure real-world performance across leading QSR and emerging restaurant formats—based on your latest findings, what trends or insights should Canadian SMB operators pay attention to if they want to turn CX from a “soft metric” into a true growth driver?
For Canadian SMB operators, the biggest takeaway is that customer experience becomes a growth driver when you start treating specific behaviours as measurable business levers. Quite simply, you manage what you measure. If you want to improve CX, you need to clearly define the moments that matter and build consistent measurement around them.
Referencing our On-Premises Study again, speed, accuracy, and human connection all showed a direct relationship with satisfaction. When guests perceived speed as slower than expected, satisfaction dropped to 76.9%, versus 96.7% when speed felt as expected. Order accuracy also remained critical, because even a relatively small error rate has an outsized impact on the guest experience.
The other important trend is that digital and AI-enabled experiences can absolutely work, but only when operators monitor them with the same discipline they apply to in-person service. Convenience alone is not enough. Guests still remember whether the process felt smooth, accurate, and respectful.
For SMBs, this comes down to building a continuous feedback loop. Whether it’s through guest feedback programs, operational inspections and checklist data, or mystery shopping, the goal is the same: consistently measure the behaviours that drive outcomes, and act on them.
That’s why focusing on a few controllable metrics, greeting, speed perception, accuracy, and upsell execution, is so important. These are not soft metrics. They are measurable factors that directly influence repeat business, ticket growth, and loyalty.
Disclaimer:
The views and opinions expressed in this interview are those of the interviewee and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of CanadianSME Small Business Magazine. Our platform is dedicated to fostering dialogue and sharing insights that inspire and empower small and medium-sized businesses across Canada.
