For Jim Daleen, CEO of AppSuite, the future of technology is mobile and he believes his company is positioned well to tap into countless opportunities.
Daleen told Loyalty360 that many systems still rely on punch cards or rudimentary swipe card systems, and most loyalty solutions are tethered to POS systems and/or simple web apps to display point totals. He said most POS loyalty solutions are run on 20-plus-year-old technology that is costly to acquire and maintain.
AppSuite, which focuses on the restaurant industry, builds branded loyalty mobile apps tailored to the needs of hospitality clients around the world. Daleen explained that the future of the customer loyalty industry lies in providing technology that enables the following features and benefits:
Tailoring Technology: Coming systems will have analytics and data mining tools required to develop deep insights to customer needs and behavior all designed to create campaigns, offers, rewards and benefits that customers seek.
Full Service: Provide seamless, cost effective integration between all systems so that a 360-degree view of the customer (reservations, dine in orders, takeout orders, offers, social media, mobile app activity, demographic data, etc.)
Connective Technology: Branded loyalty solutions driven by mobile apps that are managed and operated by the restaurant, creating brand loyalty and affinity between the patron and the restaurant.
Integrating Communications Channels: A multichannel solution that supports marketing via mobile text and push messaging as well as email and social media connectivity.
Get Saas: SAAS “Software as a Service” model where all the data and software are safely in the “cloud” and the restaurant doesn’t require costly servers, support, and continual research and development. Solutions are cost effective to acquire and run and are setup and configured in days, not months.
“We could see where the market was going and we knew mobile technology was going to be imperative and important for customers,” he said. “We have a comprehensive customer relationship solution that embodies many aspects of caring for customers. We started with a simple idea and want to create a world-class company built with customer branded solutions. We want to bring these tools to restaurants and allow them to leverage this technology to create these relationships with the customers.”
Daleen noted some of his imperative aspects of customer are: “For customers, it starts with the basics, making it fast and easy to access important services like reservations, ordering, reward status, and point totals. More advanced customer care embodies personalized offers and benefits based upon buying behaviors, preferences, demographic data, and survey results. The combination of these CRM services creates a more satisfying and rewarding experience for customers, leading to increased visits and spending and a more enjoyable overall experience.”
Daleen said focusing on the restaurant industry is due in part to his background and “it’s hard enough to master one space than be everything to everybody.”
AppSuite’s mobile loyalty solutions offer market-ready technology that successfully increases customer frequency, customer loyalty, and increases revenue. Its loyalty solution combines branding, business intelligence, rewards, customer relationship management tools, social media, marketing, and loyalty campaigns, which are designed to keep customers engaged with a specific restaurant.
Having a branded mobile loyalty app allows a restaurant to market its business directly into a customer’s pocket. Daleen said AppSuite has the ability to aggregate various restaurants into one ‘family” and share loyalty and rewards.
“We’re bringing some pretty advanced technology because we want to continually make it easier to deploy this, market this, and promote it,” he said. “This is a branded app. We’re giving you the tool set to transform your business, increase sales, and increase profits. We go through a training process and exchange information so they can be successful.”
Getting customers to sign up is critical to obtain names and email addresses that lead to behavioral analysis, he said.
“We have the tools to aggregate the information and customer data,” he said. “Once we get this information, we run campaigns, some of which have limited focus. In most cases, we have campaigns for first-time users to come back a second and third time, and birthday and anniversary campaigns. We provide the analytics and they look at it and determine if they want to tweak campaigns to make it a more valuable offer.”
Daleen said his team is continually investing to make the company’s apps perform at higher levels.
“The bigger trends are moving people into mobile offers,” he said. “We’re also finding increased ways to bring loyalty to the merchant so smaller merchants can have more powerful systems than they could have had in the past. It’s an interesting market we’re in. The technologies we’ve assembled have worked quite well with the groups we’re focusing on.”