And Then He Took Action on Customer Feedback.
Tom Curtis, the president of Burger King, put his real phone number on TikTok and Instagram earlier this year and said one thing: give me a call. More than 86,000 people have taken him up on it, and what happened next is one of the best real-world Burger King customer feedback stories out there.
Every marketer in America is trying to figure out how Curtis pulled that off. Was it the novelty? The nerve? The fact that nobody expects a fast-food executive to actually pick up? I think all of that is beside the point. The real story, the part covered in detail by Entrepreneur, is not that a president gave out his number. It’s what Burger King built before he ever did, and what the company is doing with those calls now that they’ve come in. That’s the part worth stealing for your own business.
The Phone Number Was the Payoff, Not the Plan
Here’s what most coverage of this story misses: Curtis didn’t start listening to guests the day the number went public. He’d been at it for roughly five years, quietly rebuilding the brand’s operations, investing in restaurants before asking franchisees to reinvest a dime, and holding off on any big announcement until the improvements were real enough to survive contact with customers.
That sequencing matters more than the stunt itself. Curtis has said that he wouldn’t have felt comfortable inviting people back to Burger King and promising a better experience if the company hadn’t already done the work. Plenty of brands apologize first and improve later. Curtis flipped it. Prove it, then invite the feedback.
That’s a useful gut check for any business thinking about launching a big feedback push. If you ask customers what’s wrong before you’re ready to act on the answer, you’re just collecting complaints you’ll have no good response to. Fix what you can fix first. Then open the phone lines.
Related: How to Collect, Analyze, and Take Action on Customer Feedback: A Comprehensive Guide
Most Companies Collect Feedback. Few Know What to Do With It
What’s the most common reaction to being asked to fill out a survey? An eye roll. No one likes surveys. Yet companies still send them, a few customers fill them out, someone builds a dashboard, and then a report is generated that confirms what everybody already suspected. So nothing changes, because nobody translated the data into a next step.
What makes Burger King’s approach different isn’t the phone number. It’s that every call gets sorted. Local complaints go straight to the store or franchisee who can fix them. Specialized issues, like a problem with the digital ordering experience, get routed to whichever executive owns that area. Broader patterns, the kind that show up across hundreds of calls, get analyzed and turned into brand-level decisions about the menu, the packaging, and the in-restaurant experience.
And it’s not all complaints. A meaningful share of the calls are customers who just want to share something good, a favorite order, a great experience at a specific location, a memory the brand is tied to. Curtis makes a point of passing that praise back to the store teams directly. As he puts it, a culture of praise travels farther than a culture of criticism. This is so true.
Too many companies focus only on complaints. But compliments can be just as important; they tell you what you’re doing well so the obvious action is to do more of it.
I’ve said for years that the fastest way to understand what your customers actually think is to listen to real phone calls. A dashboard can tell you what happened, but it can’t tell you how a customer felt while it was happening. AI can help discern sentiment and even emotion, but there’s nothing quite like hearing the literal voice of your customers. Curtis figured that out by taking the calls himself.
This Is What Being Responsive Actually Looks Like
The Responsive piece of my WISER framework for creating remarkable experiences comes into play after you’ve built the other pieces. It’s about constantly listening, responding, and closing the loop, on both the good news and the bad.
Curtis closing the loop with a franchisee the same day a customer compliments a local restaurant is Responsive in action. So is routing a complaint about a broken sign to the team that can actually fix it, instead of letting it disappear into a spreadsheet.
How to Take Action on Customer Feedback at Your Business
You don’t need a viral hotline to apply any of this. You need a system that collects useful feedback (not 1-5 surveys), and a plan to take action on whatever you hear. A few places to start:
Give people an easy way to reach an actual human. It doesn’t have to be your personal cell number. It can be a manager who’s genuinely reachable, a support line that gets answered by someone who can solve the problem, or a standing invitation to talk that customers actually believe.
Sort what you hear into three simple buckets. What’s working and deserves more of the same. What’s broken and needs fixing now. And what’s just starting to show up, small enough to watch rather than panic over, but worth tracking before it becomes a pattern. Most companies only build a process for the middle bucket. The businesses that improve fastest build one for all three.
Send the praise back to the people who earned it. If a customer says something nice about your team, make sure your team hears it. It costs nothing and it builds exactly the kind of culture that produces more of the same behavior.
Don’t invite feedback until you can act on it. If you’re not ready to do anything with what customers tell you, a feedback campaign will just generate frustration. Fix what you can first. Then ask.
The next time you’re tempted to send out another survey, ask yourself Curtis’s question first: if a customer tells me something today, can I take action on it? If the honest answer is no, that’s the system worth building before you ask anyone anything.
If you’d rather not build that system from scratch, this is exactly what my Feedback to Action tool does: a two-minute AI conversation with your customers, sorted into a simple set of recommended actions your team can work on the same day.
About the Author: Dan Gingiss, CSP, is a top customer experience keynote speaker and strategist who works with corporations, associations, and franchises to create remarkable customer experiences that drive word-of-mouth. His engaging keynotes, hands-on workshops, and proven WISER™ methodology help organizations drive customer loyalty and business growth. Contact him directly to inquire about bringing him to your organization or your next event.
Image from Pexels and edited using Canva.
