guestXM – by Black Box Intelligence

Black Box Intelligence™ Announces Acquisition of AreTheyHappy

The acquisition adds leading AI and workflow automation to deliver customer insights and social management tools for restaurant brands.

May 10, Dallas, Texas, and Ghent, Belgium

Black Box Intelligence™, the leading performance benchmarking provider for the restaurant industry, announced that it had acquired AreTheyHappy, an award-winning customer experience and brand reputation management platform for restaurant and hospitality organizations.

AreTheyHappy has experienced success and adoption in Europe with leading high-growth brands such as Bastard Burgers, O’Leary’s, Honest Burgers, Rocket Restaurants, and the Coffee Company. Their solution features innovative, restaurant-specific A.I. to deliver accurate insights into a brand’s food, service, ambiance, and other factors that drive customer satisfaction, loyalty, and brand equity.

“AreTheyHappy allows a brand to identify and focus on positive or negative sentiment details mined and analyzed from reviews and social interaction,” said David Cantu, CEO of BlackBox Intelligence. “The same tool enables you to rapidly respond to changes in sentiment and reputation, to make small corrections before they become large problems. Together we can give restaurant brands the power of knowing the better factor at the right time to drive impact in the business. It’s exciting to deliver this capability to the USA.”

AreTheyHappy features a Reputation Hub to allow brands to centralize all customer feedback, i.e., review and social media channels, email, surveys, web forms, and more, into a single intuitive inbox that allows for quick replies to events in the social stream. AreTheyHappy also features Online review management for boosting Brand Perception and visibility online, with AI for analysis and conditional response templates for operation at scale. Automated Task and Reporting tools contain insights with focal points for each location to stay on top of follow-up from Insights gained.

“Black Box Intelligence is the premier provider of human capital and financial intelligence for the restaurant industry. Together, we give operators an unparalleled overview and trend analysis of customer experience vs. topline, people, and operational performance,” said Hannah Albarece, co-founder of AreTheyHappy. “It’s our mission to help restaurant brands be remarkable online and offline – ultimately closing the gap between customer experience, marketing, and frontline staff. We achieve this by giving teams all the tools to answer the central question, ‘Are my customers happy?'”

To get a demo and learn more about AreTheyHappy, visit this link.


Black Box Intelligence
The Black Box Intelligence™ mission is to give restaurant brands a comprehensive, 360° view of their business to make strategic data-backed decisions. We make this possible through benchmark data for Financial (Sales and Guest Traffic), Guest, and Workforce factors. In addition, AreTheyHappy provides a higher level of insight, detail, and the tools to review and act on the voice of the customer to turn insight into action for Restaurant brands.
Diversis Capital acquired Black Box Intelligence™ in Jan 2021. The company subsequently completed the acquisition of MillerPulse, a provider of market-level insights to restaurant companies and industry observers via a member company panel that represents approximately $90 billion in annual restaurant sales and over 50,000 US restaurants.

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