Restaurant loyalty in Kuwait: what actually works

Ask a restaurant in Kuwait why its last loyalty scheme stopped and the answer is rarely about the reward. It is that most of the customers it was meant for never stood at the counter, so there was nobody to hand anything to.

Restaurant loyalty here has to reach people who order to a flat, at midnight, for a table of eight. This guide is about designing for that: where the scheme has to live, what should earn, and what to do about the two weeks of the year when everything doubles.

Where the order lands decides where the scheme lives

A great deal of trade in Kuwait arrives for delivery. The customer never enters your restaurant, so anything printed, stamped or handed over is out of reach of the people you most want to keep.

That single fact rules out a whole family of schemes. If earning depends on a card being present, delivery customers earn nothing, and delivery customers are often your most frequent ones. Earning has to come from the order itself, wherever the order was placed.

It also changes what you are measuring. A counter scheme counts visits. A scheme attached to ordering counts orders, and an order carries a phone number, an address and a history whether the person walked in or not.

One person pays, eight people eat

The second local fact is the size of the order. Families and groups of friends order together and one person pays.

If only the payer is recognised, seven people at that table are invisible to you, and they are the ones who will choose the restaurant next time. A scheme built around a single payer quietly ignores most of the room.

There is a practical answer. Let everybody order from their own phone into one bill. Each person is then known to you, each one can hold a card, and the person paying still pays once.

"Frequency is the part most markets lack and this one has. What gets wasted is that nobody records who came, so a restaurant with hundreds of regulars still cannot name ten of them."

— Anzul Aqeel, founder of Get Menu

The busiest hour is the latest hour

The third fact is the clock. Trade here runs long after the hour most software was designed around, and the last part of the night is often the busiest.

Anything that needs a member of staff to press something, look something up or approve something will not happen then. Not through carelessness, but because the room is full. So the rule is simple: nothing in the scheme may need a human decision at the moment it matters. In our own system nobody has to mark an order delivered for a stamp to count, and a tier discount is applied at checkout without a code and without a conversation.

Where the card should live

Three places are possible, and only one of them survives.

Paper. It is at home, in a car, in a bin. Most earning never happens, and you learn nothing, because the card holds a record only the customer can see.

An app. For a restaurant somebody uses a few times a month, asking for an install is a large request, and the app is the first thing removed when the phone fills up.

The wallet already on the phone. The card is added straight to the card holder the phone already has from a link, an email or a message, with nothing to install. That is where our card goes today, and it updates itself when a stamp is added.

The iPhone version is built and waiting on one approval from the phone maker, which has its own process and its own timetable. We would rather tell you that than let you find out later.

Restaurant loyalty cards that live in the phone's own wallet are still being used in month six, which is more than most schemes manage.

What should earn

Pick one, and keep it simple enough that a customer can repeat it to a friend.

• One for each order. Easiest to hold in the head, and it suits a restaurant where the bill varies a lot.
• One for each dinar spent. Fairer where a family order and a single coffee sit on the same scheme.
• Only on one dish. The most underused of the three. It turns the scheme from a general discount into a way to move a dish that is profitable and under-ordered.

Above that, add a tier your regulars grow into, carrying its own automatic discount. Give rewards an expiry date so they are used rather than sitting on your books, and make sure two automatic discounts can never land on one order. The better single discount should win, every time.

The rest of the setup it should sit inside

A restaurant loyalty platform that keeps its own separate list of customers will drift out of date within a month. It works when it is fed by the ordering itself:

• An ordering page under your own name, and 12 page layouts to choose the shape of it.
• A menu you edit yourself, with options and add-ons carrying their own prices and required choices the kitchen can trust.
• Live stock counts on items and on options, greying out a dish at zero so nobody is offered what has run out.
• Prices decided at checkout from the live menu, so an old page cannot sell at an old number.
• Three WhatsApp messages that send themselves: the customer's confirmation, the kitchen's ticket, and the rider's link carrying the GPS pin dropped at checkout. 3 messages in about 2 seconds, with nobody at a keyboard.
• A delivery fee per building, so a tower and a house in a suburb each pay what they should.
• A code on every table, made in a designer so it looks like your restaurant, with the print pack emailed to you.
• Tax invoices carrying your registration number, downloaded by the customer as a PDF with no login.
• A spreadsheet import, so a long menu goes in once rather than item by item.

The two weeks when everything doubles

Ramadan, Eid and the days around them are when a Kuwait restaurant makes an unusual share of its year. They are also when a loyalty scheme is most likely to embarrass you.

Two things go wrong. The first is silence: the scheme sits there while the busiest fortnight of the year passes. The second is noise: three offers reach the same customer in a day because nobody was co-ordinating them.

Ready-made campaigns for Ramadan and Eid handle the first. A weekly cap per customer handles the second, and where two campaigns would reach the same person, the overlap is held for the restaurant to approve rather than sent. Marketing runs in its own queue as well, so a campaign going out can never delay an order confirmation.

What to look at after two months

Not the number of cards issued. That counts how many people were handed something, and it is the figure most likely to make a failing scheme look healthy.

Look at two other things instead. Cards that have never moved: people who joined and never came back, which tells you the first reward is too far away. And regulars who have gone quiet: customers who ordered steadily and then stopped, who can be offered something specific rather than being included in a message sent to everybody.

If you are still choosing the shape of the scheme, our guide to designing a restaurant loyalty program covers the mechanics in more detail, and the QR menu guide covers the ordering page the scheme sits on.

You get 15 days to try it, with no card asked for, which is long enough to launch a scheme and watch the first cycle of it. Pricing is on the pricing page rather than in this article. Payment stays with you: cash, or your own card machine at the door or the table, with no online payments in the system, so no card details are held in it, and an order's details are erased once they are 120 days old.

Frequently asked questions

Can a delivery customer earn on a scheme like this?

Yes, and that is the point of attaching it to the order rather than the counter. Somebody who never enters your restaurant earns exactly as somebody sitting at a table does.

What about a table of eight where one person pays?

If everybody orders from their own phone into one bill, everybody at the table is recognised, and one person still settles the whole thing.

Does my staff have to do anything?

No, and that is deliberate. A scheme that needs a member of staff to remember something at midnight is a scheme that stops working in your busiest hour.

Do customers have to install an app?

No. The card is added to the wallet already on their phone from a link, so there is nothing to download and nothing for anyone to hand over.

Can I run an offer during Ramadan without annoying people?

Yes. There is a cap on how often one customer can be messaged in a week, and when two campaigns would reach the same person the overlap waits for you to approve it.