Integrating Loyalty Data With Restaurant Ordering & Delivery

A frictionless ordering and payment process is essential to restaurants. What are some critical considerations for implementing a solution?

We know that today, on average, 30% of orders come in digitally, and for some brands that number is much higher. With that much at stake, you want the entire experience to be perfect. After all, if a third of your customers interact with you through a mobile phone or a website, then the core of their customer experience is whatever is happening right then and there. This means that brands need to think through the whole experience, beyond just delivering a decent menu. You want the images to look perfect, the menu to be easily navigable, and the customization to happen in real-time. At the end of that transaction, there shouldn’t be any slowdown with payments, which would put the whole order at risk.

But that’s the basics, you need to go beyond looking great to being personalized. A vegetarian won’t find a hamburger appetizing, so serving up that image as part of the initial experience could push the guest away. You can only offer this kind of personalization if you truly know your guest, which means integrating loyalty data with the order and delivery platform. These two pieces together give you the power to offer the type of personalized digital experience that guests want.

What are some of the benefits of integrating loyalty and digital ordering under a single provider?

On the technological side it’s about knowing that your entire tech stack will work together. The IT that powers today’s restaurants is complicated enough, and you want to reduce that complication as much as possible. Working with a single provider ensures that the key pieces will work perfectly together.

Beyond that it enables a truly personalized experience across all touchpoints. The loyalty data tells you who your guest is and how they like to be contacted, while the digital ordering data tells you what they like. Together you get a 360-degree view of that guest and can communicate with them in real-time.

How can loyalty programs be enhanced by data insights and artificial intelligence?

This is where the deeper value of loyalty data lies. Loyalty programs can tell a brand so much about its guests, from visit cadence to ordering patterns to spend. Once you know that information, you can start to use that knowledge to both drive actions and develop new products.

Here at Paytronix, we use AI to go deeper in creating personalized experiences, like in advanced segmentation. Rather than just segment guests in broad bands, we can find more commonalities to create customer segments that are better about driving actions. That lets us offer the right people the right offers that drive sales.

Another example is in visit cadence. A traditional loyalty program may send out winback campaigns to people who haven’t visited in a set period of time, like over a few weeks or a month. But if you have a person who comes in every day and then that cadence changes, waiting a couple of weeks is too long. AI can help a brand understand the cadence and deliver a winback message at the right time.

It all comes down to having the right technology to create the best customer experience possible.