BEHAVES-in-action
Using BEHAVES to improve the customer experience

What really gets us singing from the rooftops, is when organisations take what they’ve learned in the BEHAVES Academy and apply it out in the world.

Take the Italian restaurant chain Zizzi, for example.

BEHAVES-in-action
Using BEHAVES to improve the customer experience

What really gets us singing from the rooftops, is when organisations take what they’ve learned in the BEHAVES Academy and apply it out in the world.

Take the Italian restaurant chain Zizzi, for example.

The Behaviour

Launched in leafy Chiswick 25 years ago, Zizzi now brings ‘Italian food with a twist’ to 135 restaurants across the UK and Ireland. “Good food does more than fill you up,” they say. “It brings people together.”

Amen to that. And this life-affirming approach means Zizzi is always looking to improve. How can everyone – from customers to servers – have the best possible experience while keeping standards tip-top?

So, the measurable behaviour Zizzi decided to focus their action-planning session on was to raise their customer experience scores by increasing personal interactions with customers in-store.

The Approach

Now that the Zizzi L&D team had a specific goal in mind, the next question was of course: how can we increase personal interactions?

"In the L&D world, we talk about knowledge and skills but rarely talk about behaviours. Or, we know we want to change behaviours - but we’re not necessarily sure how to do it."

Dan Cooper-Thomlinson,
Head of Learning and Development at Zizzi

Luckily, our training course is designed to help teams like Dan’s think through the behaviour side of their business challenges. So, the Zizzi team started by completing the BEHAVES academy e-learning modules – and loved it!

“I find e-learning in general can be quite static,” says Dan. “But BEHAVES gets you thinking and gives an anchor point on how to change behaviour.”

Working with the BEHAVES team and Zizzi’s technology partner Mapal, the Zizzi L&D team incorporated a blend of live sessions in between completing the e-learning modules, to bring a flipped-classroom approach to digesting what they were learning. And, once they’d worked through all the materials, it was time for their final action-planning workshop.

On the day, the L&D team surprised themselves with the strength of the ideas they generated in the session – and have committed to putting them all into action.

“These ideas are great, because we’re looking to develop even further in 2025,” says Dan. “By testing, learning and evolving our brand, we’ll make sure we keep ahead of customer trends. We want to create even more emotive and customer-centric experiences across the casual dining sector – to really bring to life dining experiences that inspire, unite and fulfil our customers. All of that at some level involves behaviour change.

The Approach

Now that the Zizzi L&D team had a specific goal in mind, the next question was of course: how can we increase personal interactions?

"In the L&D world, we talk about knowledge and skills but rarely talk about behaviours. Or, we know we want to change behaviours - but we’re not necessarily sure how to do it."

Dan Cooper-Thomlinson,
Head of Learning and Development at Zizzi

Luckily, our training course is designed to help teams like Dan’s think through the behaviour side of their business challenges. So, the Zizzi team started by completing the BEHAVES academy e-learning modules – and loved it!

“I find e-learning in general can be quite static,” says Dan. “But BEHAVES gets you thinking and gives an anchor point on how to change behaviour.”

Working with the BEHAVES team and Zizzi’s technology partner Mapal, the Zizzi L&D team incorporated a blend of live sessions in between completing the e-learning modules, to bring a flipped-classroom approach to digesting what they were learning. And, once they’d worked through all the materials, it was time for their final action-planning workshop.

On the day, the L&D team surprised themselves with the strength of the ideas they generated in the session – and have committed to putting them all into action.

“These ideas are great, because we’re looking to develop even further in 2025,” says Dan. “By testing, learning and evolving our brand, we’ll make sure we keep ahead of customer trends. We want to create even more emotive and customer-centric experiences across the casual dining sector – to really bring to life dining experiences that inspire, unite and fulfil our customers. All of that at some level involves behaviour change.

What happens in a BEHAVES action planning workshop?

In our action-planning sessions, we work through our BEHAVES process, focusing on whatever behaviour you have pre-identified with us in your onboarding session. See below to see how this worked for Zizzi.

Target the behaviours you want to change
How someone feels when changing behaviour
Barriers blocking a behaviour change
Things you can try to change the behaviour
Testing and refining your intervention(s)
Assessment of the success of the intervention
Wider impact of the behaviour change

This framework is broken down into three phases.

Phase 01

Behaviours and Emotions make up the Objective Phase.

The Objective-setting phase

In the BEHAVES process, we always start with an overarching behaviour that we want to focus on. “How do we personalize service better and what does that mean in terms of behaviour?” is one such question, says Dan. “Or: ‘How do we become more warm and friendly? What does it look like?’”

“We used the BEHAVES process to break those behaviours down,” says Dan. “And think through how we could help change some of the underlying drivers, as well as how we could later measure our success.”

Emotions are a big part of behaviour change conversations. We humans have a varied emotional palette – and changes in behaviour will often be fuelled by an emotion of some sort. In BEHAVES, we always want to link our target behaviours to a positive emotion, and it was no different in this case study.

“At Zizzi, it’s already very much part of our culture to talk about the values, mindset and emotions that are driving our teams’ behaviours,” says Dan. “So, we found the BEHAVES framework is very translatable, because we’re already talking about mindset and how to create positive emotions within our team.”

The Zizzi team quickly settled on a measurable, service-related behaviour and agreed to link it to two positive emotions – pride and confidence.

Phase 02

Hurdles, Actions and Verification form the Strategy Phase.

The (exciting) strategy phase

Once we have identified the behaviour and emotions, the next step is to identify the hurdles getting in the way of that behaviour – and think about what actions we could take to help mitigate them. In their action-planning workshop, the Zizzi team identified lots of potential hurdles – helped by data they already had.

“We run an engagement survey every four or five months,” explains Dan. “So we were able to use those comments to identify the hurdles. For example, one was around time – ‘I don’t have time to do this’ – that’s a hurdle. Plus, there’s an element of confidence, that’s another hurdle. The BEHAVES framework encouraged us to use those themes to drive our actions, which was great.”

In fact,  after they completed their first workshop, Dan’s team liked this approach so much that they have since applied the BEHAVES framework to several other Zizzi initiatives, coming up with over 200 actions that they would like to implement.

“This is very hot off the press. But we’ve already used the BEHAVES Academy to almost redesign what our induction programme looks like and what our management development programme could potentially look like.”

The Verification stage is ongoing – including brainstorming, troubleshooting, piloting, A/B testing and experimentation.

Phase 03

Evaluation and Systems are the steps in the Evaluation Stage.

The evaluation phase

Once we’ve identified and started implementing our actions – or interventions – it’s time to think about how we’ll measure them. In business, we don’t always want to go for a scientific, random controlled trial (RCT) approach. More often than not, we just want to use the ideas to experiment and see what seems to work. Finding out what works, however, means we must think about measurement. In this phase, we ask questions like:

Did the behaviour change – and if so, by how much? What could be improved?  What are the next steps? 

As for the Zizzi team, their initiatives haven’t run for long yet, so it’s too early to evaluate. But it’s definitely part of their plan. They collect a lot of data about their business, including feedback from customers and online reviews.

“In time, this will give us an indication of how well we are shifting the quality of our service in our restaurants,” says Dan.

The BEHAVES process also encourages us to consider what some of the wider effects of our behaviour change could be. When it comes to the overall Evaluation and Systems phase, this is all a process. Over to Dan:

“We’ll assess and iterate, with a view to scale over the next six months,” he says.

The Objective-setting phase

In the BEHAVES process, we always start with an overarching behaviour that we want to focus on. “How do we personalize service better and what does that mean in terms of behaviour?” is one such question, says Dan. “Or: ‘How do we become more warm and friendly? What does it look like?’”

“We used the BEHAVES process to break those behaviours down,” says Dan. “And think through how we could help change some of the underlying drivers, as well as how we could later measure our success.”

Emotions are a big part of behaviour change conversations. We humans have a varied emotional palette – and changes in behaviour will often be fuelled by an emotion of some sort. In BEHAVES, we always want to link our target behaviours to a positive emotion, and it was no different in this case study.

“At Zizzi, it’s already very much part of our culture to talk about the values, mindset and emotions that are driving our teams’ behaviours,” says Dan. “So, we found the BEHAVES framework is very translatable, because we’re already talking about mindset and how to create positive emotions within our team.”

The Zizzi team quickly settled on a measurable, service-related behaviour and agreed to link it to two positive emotions – pride and confidence.

The (exciting) strategy phase

Once we have identified the behaviour and emotions, the next step is to identify the hurdles getting in the way of that behaviour – and think about what actions we could take to help mitigate them. In their action-planning workshop, the Zizzi team identified lots of potential hurdles – helped by data they already had.

“We run an engagement survey every four or five months,” explains Dan. “So we were able to use those comments to identify the hurdles. For example, one was around time – ‘I don’t have time to do this’ – that’s a hurdle. Plus, there’s an element of confidence, that’s another hurdle. The BEHAVES framework encouraged us to use those themes to drive our actions, which was great.”

In fact,  after they completed their first workshop, Dan’s team liked this approach so much that they have since applied the BEHAVES framework to several other Zizzi initiatives, coming up with over 200 actions that they would like to implement.

“This is very hot off the press. But we’ve already used the BEHAVES Academy to almost redesign what our induction programme looks like and what our management development programme could potentially look like.”

The Verification stage is ongoing – including brainstorming, troubleshooting, piloting, A/B testing and experimentation.

The evaluation phase

Once we’ve identified and started implementing our actions – or interventions – it’s time to think about how we’ll measure them. In business, we don’t always want to go for a scientific, random controlled trial (RCT) approach. More often than not, we just want to use the ideas to experiment and see what seems to work. Finding out what works, however, means we must think about measurement. In this phase, we ask questions like:

Did the behaviour change – and if so, by how much? What could be improved?  What are the next steps? 

As for the Zizzi team, their initiatives haven’t run for long yet, so it’s too early to evaluate. But it’s definitely part of their plan. They collect a lot of data about their business, including feedback from customers and online reviews.

“In time, this will give us an indication of how well we are shifting the quality of our service in our restaurants,” says Dan.

The BEHAVES process also encourages us to consider what some of the wider effects of our behaviour change could be. When it comes to the overall Evaluation and Systems phase, this is all a process. Over to Dan:

“We’ll assess and iterate, with a view to scale over the next six months,” he says.

Our Behavioural Insights Toolkit

One of the things that we think makes the BEHAVES Academy special is our Insights Toolkit. We believe that all of the hundreds of behavioural insights out there fit into our seven categories – and we get you started with your first 21. It’s a bit like a filing cabinet for insights.

This means you can use our categories as a checklist to think through which insight “families” may be especially helpful to enhance your particular approach. When using the framework, we’ll use these insights together to strengthen your campaign.

So, some of the questions Dan’s team were considering in their workshop were things like: How do we increase levels of autonomy (a key to success at work)? Who should deliver the messaging? What rewards system are in place? And so on.

All Behavioural insights fall into 7 distinct categories.

The Outcome

Dan is upbeat about the future and the role behavioural science can play with his team at Zizzi.
“BEHAVES definitely helped us tackle things a bit differently,” says Dan. “The solutions we brainstormed are more creative than what we’ve done in the past.”
And the word is filtering through to the whole team.

"BEHAVES has given us great conversations. Some of my team are quite junior and still learning the craft of L&D - so, BEHAVES has already helped their personal development."

Dan Cooper-Thomlinson,
Head of Learning and Development at Zizzi

We'll keep a close eye on Zizzi’s progress. Because it’s precisely what we want to see: BEHAVES out there and helping your world of work, work better.

Would you like us to help you use the BEHAVES Academy to change a specific behaviour on your team?
Get in touch for an informal chat to discuss.

Would you like us to help you use the BEHAVES Academy to change a specific behaviour on your team?

Get in touch for an informal chat to discuss.