Best Practices for Leveraging Restaurant Data
Please speak to critical considerations and benefits of leveraging artificial intelligence to deliver customer experience.
It begins with the data. Regardless of how good the AI is at understanding trends, it needs the right data to be truly effective. We look at AI as a way to personalize the digital experience and engage the guest. There are obvious examples, like making sure that a vegan doesn’t get an image of a burger in an email. But then there are the less obvious ways that truly engage, like understanding which days of the week a person frequents a location, or matching their purchasing habits with other patterns to predict which items to offer up next. Sending that right offer at the right time to the right person, and doing that repeatedly, is what boosts revenue. We also use newer tools like ChatGPT to enable marketers to respond quickly to customer complaints. Giving users an email that they can edit and send fast shortens response times and increases the chances of winning back an unhappy guest.
How can Order Experience Builder empower restaurants to deliver customized digital guest experiences?
Order Experience Builder makes it possible for any brand to build customized ordering websites that truly match its brand. In the past, restaurants had two choices. One was a templated site that offered little flexibility in expressing the unique aspects of the brand. The other was an expensive custom site that was out of the reach of many of our customers. Worse, any upgrades to the digital ordering software required expensive changes to the website.
Order Experience Builder bridges the gap between templates and custom builds, giving brands flexibility in design without requiring a custom build. Also, because it works with Paytronix Online Ordering, any upgrades will be automatically part of the ordering site, no coding necessary.
What are some of the benefits of integrating multiple channels under a single provider?
The key to guest engagement is ensuring that the various components align so that the right information gets used to create the right actions. What we hear from clients often is that they can’t get the most out of their loyalty program if it’s not perfectly in sync with their online ordering platform, messaging system, CRM platform and so on. Making everything work to its fullest is very difficult, and if one thing isn't performing as expected, it’s easy for each provider to blame the others. Paytronix is focused on aligning those components, so guests keep coming back and building revenue.
During a recent talk at MURTEC with Regina Jerome of UNO’s, a member of the audience asked about the tradeoff between working with a single vendor vs. purchasing best-of-breed solutions. Regina noted that when her teams went with separate solutions that offered all the bells and whistles, any misalignment between products were filled in by her team manually, costing them time. Turning to a single vendor meant that some of the extras she may have gotten weren’t available, but the alignment freed her team up to tackle other tasks and take on more creative projects, offering much greater business benefit. In that way, the advantages of a single vendor outweighed the perceived benefits associated with a best-of-breed strategy.