There’s some tasty news to celebrate this summer. Delish Sisters, a fresh and wholesome food brand from South Africa, opened its first-ever U.S. location at Clemson University’s new The Shepherd Hotel, a full-service accommodation that employs individuals with disabilities.
Delish Sisters sought out Paytronix technology for online ordering and delivery, customer loyalty, gift cards, and the launch campaign. As part of the Paytronix Gives Back program, the cost of the programs were covered in full.
According to the Delish Sisters’ website, the eatery’s collaboration with The Shepherd Hotel and the ClemsonLIFE program brings, “a team concept with heart, centered around empowering and employing people with special needs/abilities.” The Shepherd Hotel was founded with the mission of positively impacting lives, while ClemsonLIFE empowers students with intellectual disabilities. Paytronix could not be more proud to have a customer that supports this mission.
Though the original plan was to launch in March, construction delays had no damper on the Delish Sisters’ opening day. On August 8, gorgeous green plants, a bouquet of fresh flowers, and freshly baked croissants were arranged neatly in the light-filled restaurant. Employees smiled as Delish Sisters welcomed its first customers—just in time for fall semester.
Online ordering is changing the way many brands think about the guest relationship. Digital channels offer a level of convenience that is hard to beat, however removing some of the face-to-face communications creates an inherent risk that poor experiences will not be heard about or addressed. Paytronix FEEDbackSM offers a solution to this by giving your guests an easy way to provide their comments and reviews – good and bad – while making it easy for you, your franchisees, or unit managers, to respond to guests and recover guests who have poor experiences.
AI-Driven responses make it easy to act on customer reviews.
Configurable response options within FEEDbackSM save you time while also making your guests feel heard, deterring them from posting negative reviews publicly before you have had the chance to recover from the situation. If your pre-configured options are not a fit in response to a guest’s review, you can also customize the response, including an option to offer a discount or coupon to encourage a return visit.
The newest FEEDbackSM feature makes responding to guests easier than ever. The new AI-enhanced response feature analyzes reviews – even those where guests don’t leave comments- and drafts a response email based on guest sentiment. This AI to IASM feature learns continuously and can respond in ways tailored to your brand, including accents, and signature sign off lines, allowing you to maintain a consistent brand voice while improving brand reputation, retaining guests and saving time!
Before creating your email draft, your team will have the opportunity to determine the best course of action to take. The FEEDbackSM page includes the guest’s ordering history and previous behavior to allow your team to choose whether or not to give a discount or just provide a response.
The AI response feature is available to all Paytronix Order & Delivery customers. Reach out today to learn more or to have it activated on your existing account.
With the summer vacation season in full gear, C-stores should take advantage of travelers who are passing through for work or pleasure. Just as brands segment and market to their regular customers, it’s also possible to reach out to different categories of travelers with tailored offers designed to get them into your stores and buying more.
In this report, Paytronix explains the data science behind segmenting travelers from other customers and then further subdividing the segment into frequent and occasional travelers. The report describes how marketers can leverage this data to:
Identify trends within the traveler population
Determine what products each segment is purchasing
Develop marketing strategies to target each segment
Travelers represent a tremendous opportunity for brands to reinforce their unique value propositions. Whether they are truck drivers coming off the road after a long day, or vacationers in the midst of generating lifelong memories, the members of this segment deserve special attention. Targeting them can go a long way toward building loyalty and increasing revenue.
As customers’ tastes lean increasingly digital, brands can take action now to capitalize on ease of use. That means not only making the ordering and reviewing process easier but enabling the process to intelligently adapt to the customer.
The solution: a smart order-and-delivery process, which can be facilitated through artificial intelligence (AI). Paytronix called this Artificial Intelligence to Individual Action, or AI to IASM.
Paytronix has integrated AI into all its products to make the customer experience easier and more intelligent. Using one of the largest datasets of consumer transactions in the industry, Paytronix has one of the strongest models with deeper insights that drive individual action through artificial intelligence, referred to as AI to IASM. You can set out to create great guest experiences and run new campaigns, confident that decision engines are using insights and making recommendations that have worked for years.
Paytronix has published The Order & Delivery Report 2022, which details this trend and the data surrounding it. This blog and the ones that follow will highlight findings from that report, as well as sheds new light on recently acquired data.
Sentiment Analysis
For instance, what if your technology could bring a more in-depth understanding to your reviews? Consider the role that sentiment plays. The rating an establishment receives and the words that accompany that rating may actually tell two different stories.
Paytronix data shows that 15% of orders with a rating of 4.5 or better actually have a negative sentiment and could benefit from action, while 3-star reviews most frequently contain negative sentiment.
Sentiment analysis, which can be accomplished using AI, is one tool that can help. Sentiment analysis enables the store manager to identify negative reviews that otherwise would have been missed and act quickly to recover the situation. This is important because sentiment scores are nearly as accurate a predictor of whether a patron will return as the ratings themselves. And as the below examples show, high ratings can hide poor customer experience.
Intelligent Menu Design
Another exciting implication of AI is the potential to influence customer ordering choices through smart menu design and recommendations.
Some establishments have long or complex menus, causing customers to gloss over some options or potential add-on items. Understanding where to place options on the menu and when to suggest an additional item can make a big difference in the order total.
Multivariant menu testing can determine how to help customers make sense of large menus in a way that’s beneficial for restaurants and c-stores. Working with Paytronix, National Coney Island — well-known for their large, detailed menu with plenty of options for everyone — utilized multivariant menu testing to determine if AI to IASM could reduce customer frictions with the menu.
The results were eye-opening, delivering an additional 3.5% conversion rate and $300 monthly sales lift per store.
Intelligent Menu Recommendations
Another example of helpful AI to IASM is intelligent recommendations. Recommendations are not a new feature: “Would you like fries with that?” has been a staple for a long time. But adding intelligent recommendations to digital orders provides customers a superior ordering experience while increasing revenue.
Uno Pizzeria & Grill is running a trial of intelligent recommendations, and early results have been encouraging. Uno reported that guests were twice as likely to accept the AI’s recommendations over ones manually programmed by staff. This produced a 1-3% lift on average checks from intelligent recommendation orders in comparison to no-recommendation orders, increasing Uno’s orders by between $100 and $150 per store per month.
Conclusion
There is no denying the ongoing challenge to the hospitality industry. In the wake of a global pandemic that brought the loss of over 6 million people worldwide and wreaked economic havoc, restaurants and c-stores are now wrestling with supply chain and labor disruptions amid a customer experience revolution. The world has not stopped changing, and, to succeed, the hospitality industry must embrace our new circumstances.
What is clear is that the customer experience of the future will be different than it was in 2019, before the pandemic. C-stores and restaurants will need to use technology to cater to guests wherever they are and give those guests the flexibility to receive their food through different channels. Payment must be effortless, with preferred selections front and center. And the experience of the future will enable guests to be heard when things don’t go right. AI can do all of this while removing frictions from the experience. Indeed, the future of guest experience is bright.
