Inside KFC Listens: How customer and employee experience are fuelling a cultural reset

For years, customer feedback at KFC came in from all angles - Google reviews, delivery apps, in-store surveys, QR codes on receipts - with no easy way to bring it all together. Insights were fragmented, visibility was limited and feedback rarely made it past the store level. That’s now changing.

What began as a pilot in 2020 has evolved into a global experience management (XM) strategy to unify KFC’s experience management approach. At its core is KFC Listens, a single platform connecting customer and employee feedback across 30,000 restaurants, reshaping how the world’s largest quick-service restaurant operates. Now live in more than 90% of restaurants - with the remainder to follow this year - the platform brings customer and employee experience into a shared feedback loop and a shared growth strategy.

“We knew we needed to future-proof our program, not just to sustain the business, but to use experience management as an accelerator for growth,” Abby Czito, KFC’s global lead for XM insights and analytics, says. “So the question we posed was: how do we infuse XM into every fibre of our organisation, and embed it as a way of working?”

That transformation, Czito added, has become more than just an operational upgrade - it’s a cultural reset. Frontline data, staff sentiment and diner feedback are now shaping everything from menu decisions to delivery processes.

“We’ve moved from collecting feedback to acting on it. That cultural shift, from measurement to action, is where the growth is.”

In Australia this week as part of Qualtrics X4 Sydney, Czito says before KFC Listens, experience management across the business was fragmented. The company had more than 150 different programs running across markets, each with its own metrics, platforms and priorities.

“There was no consistency in how we captured feedback from either customers or staff,” she says. “We couldn’t compare performance across restaurants, let alone markets. And we definitely weren’t learning from each other.”

Even simple changes were hard to scale. With no shared measurement system, best practice in one market often failed to reach another. Some markets tracked Net Promoter Scores, others didn’t. Employee feedback, when collected, rarely made it to restaurant managers in real time. “It was a missed opportunity,” Czito says. “Especially given how much insight our staff have into customer experience.”

In partnership with Qualtrics, KFC developed a single, standardised XM platform that could replace the 150-plus programs with one integrated system.

“We needed global scale, but also local flexibility,” Czito says. “That meant building a program where every market gets the same foundation, but can tailor questions and priorities to local needs.”

Today, the system captures structured and unstructured feedback from both customers and employees, flowing into dashboards accessible across the business, from HQ to individual restaurant managers.

Crucially, the platform is live for both CX and EX from day one in every market. “That was a non-negotiable,” Czito explains. “We believe you can’t improve the guest experience without understanding the staff experience too.”

The shift from measurement to action

But the tech is only part of the story. What’s made KFC Listens stick is a deliberate shift in mindset, away from tracking metrics and toward activating change.

One example: customers in India complained about missing condiments in delivery orders. That insight helped KFC rework its delivery processes. In Australia, negative feedback on chip quality triggered operational changes that elevated fries to a key focus in local strategy.

“Those might seem like small examples, but they show how real-time feedback - when surfaced clearly and shared widely - can drive tangible improvements.”

To help markets build maturity, Czito introduced a tiered model - foundational, growing, evolving - that lets each country progress at its own pace. Markets are encouraged to move toward closed-loop feedback, internal governance and stakeholder alignment, with KFC’s global team providing toolkits and playbooks along the way.

The link between employee experience and customer satisfaction isn’t just intuitive, it’s now backed by hard data. In one UK study, KFC found that restaurants in the bottom quartile for staff engagement were 50% more likely to receive negative guest scores. More tellingly, guests who had a top-box (5/5) experience were 54% more likely to return - and spent 6% more on their next visit. Even a 1% lift in top-box scores could drive millions in incremental revenue.

“This changes the narrative around experience,” Czito says. “We’re not just asking people to be happy at work. We’re showing that happy staff make guests more likely to return - and that’s a revenue driver.”

It also changes the role of experience teams. At KFC, CX and EX now report under a single leadership structure, which in Czito’s case is not the marketing team. The language has shifted too: surveys are no longer just feedback tools, but operational triggers. Measurement is only useful if it drives frontline action.

Listening, not just surveying

The rebrand to KFC Listens was intentional. “We wanted a name that signalled action, not process,” Czito says. “It’s not called KFC Surveys for a reason.”

Internally, the brand’s XM maturity is growing. Global leadership is leaning on experience data to inform business cases, franchisees are buying in thanks to visible results, and XM committees are forming across major markets.

“We’ve gone from asking ‘what is XM?’ to hearing leaders say ‘we should check what the XM data says,’” Czito says. “That’s a huge shift.”

KFC isn’t treating Listens as a one-off project. The ambition is to embed experience into how the brand works, from operational strategy to new product launches. And with 30,000 restaurants and more than 2 million daily customers, the scale of impact is significant.

“This isn’t just about customer service or employee engagement,” Czito says. “It’s about building a culture of listening so we can learn faster, adapt smarter, and grow stronger.”

In a category that often defaults to discounts and product innovation, KFC is showing that culture and operational clarity might just be the biggest growth levers of all.