Customer Loyalty

Loyalty is one of the key buzzwords for hospitality. Having your existing customers come back more often is an excellent tool with which to keep your outlets filled and utilising them to act as ambassadors on your behalf, spreading the word about what you do is a fantastic way of advertising.

There are four primary methods of customer loyalty and rewards that you can implement:

Rewards scheme.
Gift certificates.
Promotional coupons.
Membership discounts.

Features that complement these methods include keeping a database of your customers, assigning loyalty cards to them and tracking what they spend. It is an excellent tool that allows you to increase your turnover through increased loyalty as well as an effective method of sending mail-shots to previous visitors.

Core features

Saves vital customer information
Stores customer comments and notes
Can automatically discount VIP customers
Stores the last three orders of a registered customer
Logs total YTD expenditure
Can store all customer information on a swipe card
Notes the customer’s company for group discounts
Can search and charge to the customer from the front of house terminals or the back office
Can store a customer picture or fingerprint for a more secure venue
Can code customers to a swipe card

Reward schemes

32 different schemes
Unlimited number of bonus levels
Levels decided by number of visits, amount spent, or number of items bought
Can narrow down items by prefix and department
Can assign specific plans to specific diners
Can reward by gift card, discount, credit to account or coupons
Multiple reward levels which need to be repeated a certain number of times before achieving the next level

Gift certificates

Gift certificates can be purchased and assigned to a pre-programmed loyalty card. Gift cards are encoded so that after a single till swipe they cannot be re-used, however they can be recycled after being unlocked.

Certificates can be:

Auto numbered
Applied with an expiry date
Allowed/disallowed partial redemption and cash refunds
Customised with a specific amount
Can be redeemed during certain times, e.g. Sunday between 4pm and 6pm
Up to 100 coupon schemes can be run at any one time

Coupons

Coupons can function in the same manner as gift certificates with discounts of cash off specific items:

Can be applied a single time or a number of times
Can change an item price to a set amount
Subtract a set amount from an item’s price
Subtract a percentage from an item’s price
Can subtract, discount or change item costs up to 30 items per coupon
Can be redeemed during certain times

Reports

Look-up of customers past checks
Filter by date, customer name and item
Email customers from Outlook
Filter email by region, customer name, item type, age etc
Export to Microsoft Excel for easy modification, showing customer balances, name, etc
Report on issued gift certificates and redemption

Interfaces

Can be linked to ACT (database)
Can be linked to reservations packages such as QNet or Open Table

Other features and functions:

Cashless card system
Prepaid promotional vouchers
Targeted gift certificates
Targeted email campaigns
’VIP’ members with a discount
Frequent salad eater discount
Buy 9 get your 10^th item for free
Can reward specific companies for their business