A Flexible & Personal Cross-Channel Guest Experience

Mobile ordering and payment are a top priority for restaurant operators and customers. How can tech partners support restaurants in implementing and upgrading mobile options?

Today’s restaurants take in nearly half of their orders from a digital channel, much of that through mobile devices and largely in thanks to bridge millennials. This demographic’s higher income and familiarity with tech makes them a particularly valuable guest for today’s restaurants. They are a prime target for loyalty programs and online ordering services, and they are likely to remain the driving force behind the digitalization of the restaurant industry. 

Throughout the pandemic, younger consumers grew accustomed to the convenience and safety afforded by digital solutions. Now, as indoor dining returns, restaurants are combining digital and on-premises services to create a cross-channel guest experience that’s flexible and personalized. Once restaurants achieve that balance, they must optimize their technology and operations to ensure a consistent, and convenient guest experience across all channels.

Digital engagement is vital for today's restaurants — how can data strategy enhance customer engagement?

A single, digital branded experience yields terrific benefits for restaurants and their guests. Integrated software tech lightens the load on operations, simplifies data reporting, and allows brands to get the most out of their marketing investments. Paytronix’s platform provides a centralized hub to process orders (both in-house or through a third party), track guest information and sales data, and launch AI-driven marketing campaigns all from one place. Restaurants can easily communicate with guests on a moment-to-moment basis and run tests to optimize their menus. Surveys show that guests ultimately care about the experience – an integrated digital solution enables restaurants to own every interaction with their guests.  

Also, a touch-and-go mobile app that combines loyalty, ordering, and payment enables guests to fully interact with a brand wherever they are. The entire order and delivery journey is streamlined and personalized: guests can check and redeem rewards effortlessly, save payment methods and orders to make their next order even easier, and stay up to date on changes in store operations. Only through a single, digital guest engagement solution can restaurants provide an industry-leading guest experience. 

Pulling it all together, how has loyalty evolved? How can mobile transactions, digital engagement, and data analytics help drive the new loyalty journey?

Every brand needs to find the right digital balance for its guests. On one end of the spectrum are virtual brands that take orders from the web or mobile phone, operate out of ghost kitchens, and deliver food to a remote location. On the end are entirely in-person experiences in which the customer receives only human service. Most brands exist in the middle but finding the right mix along that digital spectrum is about listening to your guests to create the right guest journey.

Here at Paytronix we use what we call Artificial Intelligence for Individual Action. We train algorithms on our deep well of data to understand human behavior and find clusters of people who act similarly. This enables us to understand what actions a marketer can take to drive an action. Ultimately it’s about creating a personalized experience for each guest, at scale. This can be as simple as sending an email at a time that a guest is likely to open it, or about ensuring that an image in a promotion doesn’t show beef to a vegetarian. But it can also mean creating personalized menus that offer up favorite choices, or prioritizes gluten free options to a gluten free guest. 

The more we know about a guest through their loyalty data, and the more the different technology platforms work together, the better experience we can create overall.

Learn more at Paytronix.com