Come Rain or Shine Podcast with Dan Cockerell

Dan Cockerell: Hey everyone, and welcome to Come Rain or Shine. As always, you’re here with Dan Cockerell.

Today I have Adam Alfia calling in from Dallas-Fort Worth. Adam and I connected a couple of months ago, and we finally got the chance to sit down for this podcast.

Adam is a serial entrepreneur who studied at SMU in Dallas, and he has done a lot in the hospitality and technology sectors around different tools and platforms. Today, we’re going to hear a little bit about Adam’s story, a little bit about his time with Maestro, the company he was formerly with, and now his new product, Real Time Feedback, which I’m really excited about because it gets right to the heart of hospitality and real-time data, which I know everyone is looking for.

Adam, welcome to Come Rain or Shine. How are you today?

Adam Alfia: Great. Great. Thank you for having me on, Dan.

Dan Cockerell: Very good. And congratulations, your son just graduated from the University of Arkansas. Razorback alum, right?

Adam Alfia: Yeah. Very excited.

Dan Cockerell: Another one out of the nest. Congratulations on that.

Before we dive in, tell us a little bit about your life and career progression up to today.

Adam Alfia: I actually moved to the United States from Israel when I was 7. I’m here in Dallas, Texas, and when I was going to SMU, I took an entrepreneurship class. The professor asked us to create a business plan for a make-believe company.

That same night, I had my Jaguar in an auto repair shop for an oil change and maintenance. The bill came out to around $795. I was 19 or 20 years old at the time, and I remember thinking that was a lot of money. I had saved up to buy that car myself, and it was a beautiful 1986 Jaguar XJS. I wanted to take care of it, but I realized there had to be an alternative to paying dealership prices for basic service.

So I decided to build my business plan around an import auto repair shop that could provide the same level of service for brands like Mercedes and Jaguar.

During the research process, my dad introduced me to a mechanic he knew. I was interviewing him for the class, and at one point he asked, “Are you actually trying to open an auto repair shop?” I told him no, it was just for school. But he said if I ever wanted to do it, he had been thinking about going independent himself.

At that point, I had about $40,000 to $50,000 saved up, and I decided to do it. I would put up the money, he would fix the cars, and we’d try to build something together.

I leased a space near a private school in a really good part of Dallas. It was an old gas station that had shut down. I spent every free hour after class painting the place, cleaning it up, and buying parts. I didn’t know anything about the car business. I didn’t even know how to change oil or tires.

The day we were supposed to open, the mechanic called and said, “I’m bringing over my toolbox. I haven’t told my boss yet.”

I said, “Don’t you think you should have told him 2 weeks ago?”

He said, “No, I’ll tell him now.”

An hour later he called back and said, “He just doubled my salary. I’m staying.”

So suddenly I had a repair shop and no mechanic. For 2 years, I lost my butt.

After I graduated, I told myself I’d give it another year and a half or 2 years and see if I could make it work. If not, I’d move on. Using what I had learned in school about marketing and business, we turned it around. Within about 3 months, I was making around $10,000 a month in profit.

Then 6 months later, once we finally had money in the bank, the place burned down. We had a faulty gas heater, and the whole shop burned to the ground. We lost 17 customer cars in the fire.

That taught me a major lesson about insurance. I only had around $10,000 in coverage and ended up facing around $400,000 in claims. I sold what I could, worked out deals with the customers over about 4 years, and eventually rebuilt.

Over time, we grew from 1 location near SMU to 4 locations. Then in 2005, one of my customers, who was a large homebuilder in Dallas, approached me and said he wanted to buy the businesses.

He bought them, but I didn’t realize he was already in financial trouble. We had an installment plan where he paid monthly and then a balloon payment after 4 years. Then 2008 hit, he went bankrupt, and I was left in 2nd position behind the bank. After selling the businesses for $7.5 million and thinking I had a strong start ahead of me, I ended up basically bankrupt and lost everything I had worked for over the previous 15 years.

So I started over again.

That next company was Maestro. Because I had been in the car business, I saw that GM had OnStar, but it was only for GM vehicles. So we created a call center service branded for automotive dealerships. Internally we called it MyStar, and the idea was simple: when a dealership sold a car, the customer would get access to a branded concierge service.

They could be driving down the road, call from their cell phone, and hear something like, “Hello Dan, thanks for calling Lexus of XYZ. This is Amanda. How can I help you?”

They could ask for anything. Dinner reservations. A trip to Italy. A car service appointment. Anything.

It was a true concierge experience, similar to the kind of service you get with an American Express Black Card. The goal was to create the kind of interaction where a customer hangs up and says, “Wow, that was incredible.”

In 2009, Infiniti reached out to us. We already had several Infiniti dealerships using our service, and the manufacturer said they loved what they were hearing about the customer experience. In 2010, we launched Infiniti Personal Assistant, and that changed my life. Having a platform associated with that kind of brand created tremendous momentum for us.

Since then, we’ve worked with Subaru, Mitsubishi, Nissan, and Infiniti. In those vehicles, our service is built right into the car. When the driver pushes a button, it connects directly to our call center.

That experience really shaped my focus on customer experience. Everyone has interacted with a call center, and within the first few seconds, you can tell what kind of experience you’re about to have. You can tell if the person hates their job. You can tell if they’re smiling. You can tell if they actually want to help you. That sets the tone for how you feel about the company.

Over the years, I’ve also gotten involved in other ventures. I have a chain of crab restaurants in Texas called Shell Shack. We recently sold a 50% stake to a VC firm that’s planning to help grow it from 8 locations to hopefully 50. I’ve also been involved in bars, nightclubs, and another technology platform called Apollo, which is kind of like Spotify for art. It lets you display works from well-known artists around the world on TVs in your home.

But in all of those businesses, especially the restaurants, I became obsessed with customer experience in brick-and-mortar settings. Why are customers leaving 1-star reviews? Why are we not addressing issues while they’re still in the building? How do we create real-time engagement instead of post-visit frustration?

I grew up in a very direct Israeli household, where if something was wrong at a restaurant, my mom had no problem asking for the manager and saying exactly what the problem was. I grew up with that, and I passed that mindset on to my kids. If something isn’t right and you’re paying for it, say something. Give the business the chance to fix it.

But what I started noticing, especially with younger people, was that a lot of customers were not willing to do that. They would smile at the manager, say everything was fine, and then go home and leave a 1-star review on Google.

That’s when we started asking ourselves a different question. What if there were a way for customers to communicate issues privately and digitally, right in the moment, without confrontation?

So at Shell Shack, we built exactly that.

We put QR codes on the tables. If there was any issue at all, guests could scan the code. It opened up a branded page where they could submit a message like, “My crab came out cold,” or “We haven’t seen our server in 10 minutes.”

That message went straight to the manager’s phone. The manager had an app. The customer didn’t need one. Because the QR code was tied to the table, the system already knew where the feedback was coming from.

That allowed the manager to respond in real time. They could walk right over to the table or send a message back that said, “We’re on it. I’ll bring you a fresh batch,” or “I’ll be there in a moment.”

That first layer of digital engagement changed everything.

After about a year, we stepped back and realized we had built something much bigger than a restaurant tool.

So we started offering it to other businesses.

One of our first major clients was American Airlines Center. They already had a fan engagement solution in place because the NBA and NHL require venues to have a way for guests to report issues, especially for security reasons. But the existing system was clunky. It relied on shortcodes, which might have worked 10 or 15 years ago, but aren’t intuitive anymore.

When we asked how often people actually used it, they checked and found that they had received only 24 messages all year.

We told them to try our platform. If it didn’t work, we’d remove the QR codes ourselves.

The first night they launched it during a Mavericks game, they received 42 feedback submissions.

Now they regularly get 80 to 100 per night. The codes are in the suites, on the jumbotron, in the restrooms, and throughout the venue. Their average response time is under 2 minutes.

Guests use it for everything from broken chairs to fan behavior to spills. In the suites, they can even order food and drinks through the platform.

A few weeks ago, Gina Chappa at American Airlines Center won the NBA Guest Experience Innovation Award, and it was tied directly to the success of this platform. That was a huge moment for us.

We’ve also been working with Ford. We had a 4-month pilot program, and we were recently approved to go national.

For dealerships, we built a system called Autopilot. Within 15 minutes of a customer checking out, whether from service or sales, they get a text message asking them to rate their experience on a scale of 1 to 5.

If they choose 5 stars, they’re thanked and directed to leave a Google review.

If they choose anything lower, they’re invited to privately explain what went wrong. That feedback goes straight to the manager so the issue can be addressed immediately.

It’s not a survey. It’s a simple prompt designed to capture the 1 or 2 things that may have bothered the customer.

Then the manager can respond by text, acknowledge the issue, and try to recover the relationship. Even if they can’t fix the problem entirely in the moment, simply responding quickly and showing the customer that they were heard goes a long way.

There’s a concept called the service recovery paradox. It shows that a customer who has an issue, but sees the company respond quickly and effectively, can actually become more loyal than someone who never had an issue at all. That’s because the company had the chance to prove they care.

That’s really what Real Time Feedback is all about.

Dan Cockerell: To your point, the simplicity of it is fantastic.

There are really 2 key things here. First, it gives you real-time feedback, and speed matters. If you wait too long, the frustration builds, and by the time you reach the customer, they’ve already told other people about it.

Second, it gives people another channel to speak up. Some people have no problem asking for a manager, but for a lot of people, it’s uncomfortable. Even when they want something fixed, they don’t want to create tension or work hard to get the issue resolved.

I remember when we used to do guest satisfaction surveys at Disney parks around the world. You couldn’t always compare 1 park to another because culture influenced how guests responded. Some guests were naturally more generous in person, while others had a much higher bar for excellence.

That’s why what you’re doing matters. You’re giving everyone an easy and convenient way to share what they’re really experiencing.

The other thing is this: once you open that door, you better be ready. That feedback is going to show you exactly how good your operation really is. It’s not just about solving the problem in the moment. It’s about asking what caused it in the first place.

Why are the crab cakes cold? Is there an issue in the kitchen? Are there enough staff? Is the process broken?

And that means managers need to be trained and empowered to respond. Because it’s dangerous to ask for feedback and then do nothing with it.

Adam Alfia: Exactly.

One of the things we’ve learned is that even the things you think are minor can reveal major operational blind spots.

For example, 1 restaurant got a message from a guest who said the music was way too loud during Sunday brunch. It turned out they had the same loud music setup from the late-night shift, and nobody had adjusted it for the morning crowd.

Another guest pointed out that a ceiling fan was caked with dust and probably blowing it everywhere. That’s the kind of thing people stop noticing when they work in the environment every day.

But customers notice. And if they point it out and then come back and see that it was fixed, that creates trust.

We also think a lot about customer effort. There’s a metric now called Customer Effort Score, or CES, which measures how hard it is for a customer to get help.

At a place like Home Depot, if you need help at the wood cutting station and nobody comes after they page someone, that’s a frustrating experience. So we started thinking about how QR-based trigger points could instantly notify the right employee when a customer needs help.

At American Airlines Center, the platform is also being used internally by employees. Staff can report spills, safety issues, or service needs through the same system, and we’ve built in a way to identify those messages differently from guest messages.

That’s the exciting part. It’s not just a complaint tool. It becomes a real-time operations and communications platform.

But the biggest thing is this: you have to commit to using it.

We tell clients all the time that getting feedback and not responding is worse than not having the system at all. If you’re going to ask customers to speak up, you have to show them you’re listening.

Dan Cockerell: Absolutely.

And that’s where discipline comes in. Most companies probably do care. But caring is not enough if there isn’t a process behind it.

At the end of the day, customer satisfaction alone doesn’t drive loyalty. People come back when they feel heard, respected, and taken care of.

Some companies may be afraid of transparency, but they shouldn’t be. If there are problems, customers already know. The company is often the last one to find out.

And that’s why this makes so much sense.

Adam Alfia: Exactly. You can either handle that complaint privately through our platform, or you can deal with it later on Google.

Which would you rather do?

Because once it’s public, it’s public. And negative reviews live there for a long time.

What has changed in recent years is that customers have more choices than ever, and more ways than ever to avoid bad in-person experiences. People can buy online, order delivery, get service at home. So if they are going to get in the car and come to your business, you need to make that experience worth it.

We all still want great in-person experiences. We still want to shop, dine out, go to events, and interact with brands face-to-face. But if that experience is bad, people will find other options.

That’s why customer experience matters more than ever before.

Dan Cockerell: That’s great, Adam.

For anyone listening who wants to learn more or check out the platform, where can they find you?

Adam Alfia: RealTimeFeedback.com.

Dan Cockerell: Easy enough. RealTimeFeedback.com.

This is a great example of using technology to support the customer experience in a really practical way. But as we said, it only works when there’s a culture and commitment behind it.

Adam, thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it. A lot of the best solutions are the simple, elegant ones, and this definitely sounds like one of them.

And to everyone listening, thanks again for tuning in to Come Rain or Shine.