One of the great things about being in this industry is helping iconic brands grow and adjust to the market. Checkers & Rally’s offers our latest opportunity to be part of such a change. The brand has always been known for its great burgers and its drive-thru locations, but just this week announced that it closed $20 million in funding to fuel new growth. Now its new Paytronix-driven loyalty program and mobile app will be a key part of that strategy, as the company predicts the rewards program and app will help increase guest visits by as much as 20% and increase guest spend by as much as 15%.
I recently sat down with my fellow product manager, Joel Udwin, to talk about where our worlds collide: integrating mobile at the point of sale. We like to think that a mobile strategy is placed in the pocket of the consumer, but it doesn’t stay there – mobile engagement must integrate with in-store operations to be successful. Joel, who manages our mobile products, explains why:
Q: Why is a POS integration important when it comes to mobile engagement?
A: Wow, Paige. I thought that since we worked together, you would give me easy questions, but you just knocked it out of the park. [Chuckles] I don’t like bucketing mobile into this separate silo of mobile engagement. When we talk about mobile engagement, we are really just talking about guest engagement. At restaurants and convenience stores, a large portion of customer engagement occurs at the point of sale, where most transactions take place today. Implementing an engagement strategy without considering your point of sale is like driving a small car on an icy road – you’ll move around, but you won’t necessarily be able to control where you are going. Basically, if your engagement program doesn’t translate at the POS, your employees will be too frustrated by it to evangelize it, and your guests won’t want to use it. Successful mobile engagement programs need to work in harmony with point-of-sale technology and operations.
Enrolling younger generations of guests into your rewards program can help your brand grow and maintain a strong core of loyal members for the foreseeable future. And these days, many brands believe that doing this requires their enrollment strategies to evolve so they keep up with the enrollment preferences of their increasingly younger guests. This is only partially true.
Your program should be a living and breathing entity. Adapting to match the engagement preferences of new customers will help your program attract new guests who are more comfortable using technology to connect with brands. Adaption is not a metamorphosis, but rather an expansion of enrollment methods to attract younger demographics.
Let’s say your program enrollment began exclusively as a card-based operation, and the only way members could enroll was by obtaining a plastic card in-store. You probably already know that attracting millennials to your program will help you build a sustainable base of loyal guests. So supplementing your card program by adding enrollment channels such as text-to-join or enabling enrollment via a mobile app or an online ordering system make sense. […]
One of the great things about being in this industry is helping iconic brands grow and adjust to the market. Checkers & Rally’s offers our latest opportunity to be part of such a change. The brand has always been known for its great burgers and its drive-thru locations, but just this week announced that it closed $20 million in funding to fuel new growth. Now its new Paytronix-driven loyalty program and mobile app will be a key part of that strategy, as the company predicts the rewards program and app will help increase guest visits by as much as 20% and increase guest spend by as much as 15%.