Restaurant loyalty companies: how to compare them

There are a lot of restaurant loyalty companies and their pitches are close to identical: a big percentage on a slide, a screenshot of a card, and a promise about repeat visits.

This guide is about telling them apart. It covers where those headline numbers actually come from, the five questions that separate suppliers, and the one that decides whether you can ever leave.

Read the footnote on the uplift slide

Loyalty vendors quote impressive statistics, and the statistics are usually real. What is often missing is which industry they came from.

A good example is one of the most cited pieces of loyalty research: Bain's work on the economics of loyalty. Its striking findings are drawn from retail banking, where it reports that promoters hold substantially more of their deposits with a bank than detractors, buy more products, and leave at roughly a third the rate. It also reports that more than 80% of positive referrals come from promoters.

Those are genuine findings and they are directionally useful. They are not restaurant numbers, and a bank customer's relationship is nothing like a decision about where to get lunch. When a vendor puts an uplift figure on a slide, ask which industry, which sample, and which year. A supplier who answers plainly is worth more attention than one whose number is bigger.

The five questions

1. Does the customer need an app? If yes, most of your customers will never join, and the scheme dies quietly. The card should go into the phone's own wallet, which is already installed. Both platforms document this directly: Google's loyalty card format and Apple's Wallet documentation.

2. Does earning depend on a member of staff? If a stamp needs somebody at the counter to remember, it will not happen at eight in the evening, which is when your best customers are in. Earning should come from the order itself.

3. Is it connected to your ordering, or beside it? A restaurant loyalty system that lives in a separate app, with its own customer list, means the same person exists twice and you reconcile it forever.

4. Who owns the customer list? Ask whether you can export it yourself, today, without a fee. This is the question that decides whether the next decision is yours.

5. What happens to unredeemed rewards? Rewards without an expiry are a liability growing quietly on your books. Ask how expiry works and whether you control it.

"Ask a loyalty supplier one thing before anything else: how do I get my customer list out. The ones that answer immediately are a different kind of company from the ones that need to check."

— Tanzeel ur Rehman, co-founder of Get Menu

The three shapes of supplier

Loyalty-only vendors. They do one thing and usually do it well. The cost is a second system with a second customer list, and reconciling the two forever.

A loyalty module inside a big suite. Convenient, and usually the thinnest part of the box. Ask hard about export here, because this is the module most likely to hold your list hostage.

Ordering with loyalty built in. The list is one list because the order and the stamp are the same event. This is what we build, and the honest trade is that you do not get the deep campaign tooling a specialist offers.

There is no universally right answer. There is an answer that fits how many customers you have and how much reconciliation you are willing to do.

What ours does, stated plainly

• Stamps that accrue from the order itself, per order, per dirham spent, or only on a chosen dish.
• Tiers your regulars grow into, each carrying its own automatic discount, applied without a code.
• A wallet card in the customer's phone with no app to install, with a designer for the card's colours and logo.
• One customer list, because ordering and loyalty are the same system.
• Coupons, upsells and bundles with caps, exclusions and expiry dates, and never two automatic discounts at once.
• Your own ordering page, with 12 page layouts so the menu reads the way you want it to.
• A QR menu for the tables and the window, printed from a designer rather than a generic sticker.
• Table routing. The code carries the table, so nobody writes a number down.
• A menu you edit yourself, with options and add-ons carrying their own prices, and required choices the kitchen can trust.
• Orders that price themselves. Every line is re-priced from your live menu at checkout.
• Messages nobody types. A confirmation to the customer the moment they order, a ticket to the kitchen, and for delivery a link carrying the GPS pin dropped at checkout. That is 3 messages in about 2 seconds.
• Live stock on items and on options, greying out what has gone.
• VAT invoices carrying your TRN, downloaded as a PDF without the customer logging in.

What we do not do: campaign automation of the depth a specialist offers, and any kind of points marketplace. If those are what you need, buy a specialist and accept the second list.

The costs that are not on the quote

Loyalty pricing looks simple and rarely is. Ask about all four of these before comparing monthly figures.

Per-customer pricing. Some vendors charge by the number of enrolled customers, which means the scheme gets more expensive precisely as it succeeds. Ask what happens at ten times your current list.

Message costs. If the scheme sends anything, ask who pays for the sending and at what rate. This line is often larger than the licence.

Setup and card design. Ask whether a card that looks like your restaurant rather than a template costs extra.

The reward itself. The obvious cost, and the one people model. Just remember it is the only one that buys you anything, so a supplier taking a large share of the budget in fees is taking it from the part that actually works.

How to run the comparison

Give every supplier the same test rather than sitting through each pitch.

Ask each to show a customer earning a stamp without a member of staff touching anything. Ask each to export a customer list in front of you. Ask each what a reward that is never redeemed does to your books. Then compare the answers side by side, which is much easier than comparing three decks.

Our trial runs 15 days with no card. Pricing is on the pricing page rather than in this article. Payment is cash or your own card machine, with no online payments in the system, so no card details are held in it and old order details clear automatically after 120 days.

Frequently asked questions

Are loyalty vendors' statistics trustworthy?

Usually real and often from another industry. Ask which industry, which sample and which year before you weigh a number.

Should I buy a specialist or use loyalty built into ordering?

A specialist gives deeper campaign tooling and a second customer list to reconcile. Built-in gives one list and less depth. Pick based on how much reconciliation you are willing to do.

Does the customer need an app?

They should not. The card belongs in the phone's own wallet, which is already installed on the device.

What is the most important question to ask a supplier?

How you export your customer list, yourself, today. The speed of the answer tells you most of what you need to know.

Do rewards expire?

They should, and you should control it. A reward with no expiry is a liability growing quietly on your books.