The Teahouse Sees a Boost in Customer Engagement After Partnering with Revel and SpendGo

The original Teahouse opened in the city of Kaohsiung, in Southern Taiwan. It was born from a desire to serve traditional Taiwanese tea to friends and family, and to create a place where neighbors could gather and exchange stories. Eight years later, we introduced the tradition to the U.S. and our first Teahouse opened inside the Hong Kong City Mall in Houston, Texas in April 2000.

This new store made history as the first traditional Taiwanese cream teahouse in the Houston area. Although we were not the only ones to offer tapioca cream tea in Houston, we were the only ones to keep the traditional Taiwanese flavors and offer outstanding, friendly customer service and hand selected seasonal teas.

The Teahouse welcomed a huge response from the Houston community, and as a result of this success, we have since expanded to over ten locations in Texas.

The high growth of a dynamic multi-location teahouse proved difficult, and we needed a Point of Sale (POS) system that could support us in maintaining business efficiencies at each location and supporting our expansion. Unfortunately, we were having challenges with our prior POS provider in achieving this. Each store was segmented and optimized for its location, meaning that there are slight differences in the menu setup, layout and price; it became a major pain, even when we only had five stores.

It was really important for us to find a POS solution that offered total visibility and could support our business expansion.  We selected Revel Systems, largely because their centralized back-end management makes it easy to take care of multiple locations. The control is very granular, we can make real-time menu and pricing changes across all our locations or segmented for specific locations. I've personally tested 3-4 other providers and in comparison, only Revel allows us to do the customization of settings and equipment that we needed to make our life easier.

We wanted to revamp our customer engagement strategy at the Teahouse so we could increase customer acquisition and retention across all of our locations. To address this, we chose to work with Revel’s partner, Spendgo -- a personalized customer engagement provider known for their positive user experience. One of the major requirements for us was that we wanted customers to be able to check their own points/rewards and receive reward notifications directly. We also prefer to use phone numbers so we can instantaneously send reward notifications to our customers and have them redeem those rewards from their phones. Since the implementation, my workload in points and rewards maintenance has lowered significantly and it has been really helpful in bringing in new customers and maintaining our flow of regulars.

Since we first launched the Spendgo-powered program in January 2017, it has resulted in over 112,000 new members for us averaging to about 10,000 per Teahouse location. While most loyalty programs only get a couple of hundred members per location annually, our adoption at the Teahouse has exploded thanks to the simplicity of the program and user experience. This has resulted in a whopping 530,000 member visits for us since we launched the program.

By partnering with Revel and Spendgo, we can now easily manage all of our stores through a central system, giving us full control over our POS and loyalty program in real time. Our customer engagement and acquisition processes have become significantly more streamlined and we’re much more attuned to our customers which helps to enrich and inform our loyalty and marketing campaigns.