Imagine if your favorite restaurant didn’t just know your usual but how many times you’ve ordered it, your spending habits at that establishment and what you’ve looked at on its website.
A little creepy? Perhaps. But also a great way to make sure the messaging you receive is tailored to your individual tastes, which often isn’t the case in the restaurant business.
After more than a decade in the hospitality industry, Britney Ziegler knew firsthand how frustrating data fragmentation can be. That’s why she built Panso, a CRM platform developed specifically to give restaurants a 360-degree view of their customers.
When life gives you lemons … make a CRM?
Initially, Ziegler’s plan had been to start her own restaurant – a “future-proofed restaurant model,” as she described it, that effectively functioned as a ghost kitchen with vendors and employees sourced from the local community. But when she started looking at the tech and software needed to support a hospitality business, she saw a different opportunity. “I realized I needed seven platforms just on the guest experience alone,” Ziegler said.
And so she scrapped the restaurant venture idea, and instead decided to develop a solution to make the lives of restaurateurs simpler and less chaotic.
That’s how Panso was born.
It pulls data directly from a restaurant’s existing systems, said Ziegler, and gets third-party data like point-of-sale data and reservation bookings from reservation platform partners, such as OpenTable.
Panso gives restaurants a comprehensive view of their guests, including spending patterns, their most ordered menu items and even what events they’ve attended at the venue. Restaurants can use this information to send targeted and personalized email and SMS campaigns.
For example, higher spenders might be tagged as members of a VIP audience and receive gifts like a nice bottle of wine tailored to their tastes and emails before big milestones encouraging them to celebrate at the restaurant, Ziegler said, while customers that spend less might be enticed by “value offerings” like happy hour deals and accessibly priced ticketed events.
Anything that helps foster the relationship between the customer and the establishment, said Ziegler, and deepens that sense of loyalty.
Life of the party
But while CRM data is great for reaching customers on an individual level, it also helps restaurant owners spot and track broader trends they may not have been aware of in how people are spending – things they may have missed otherwise.
After partnering with Panso, Yvette Leeper-Bueno, owner of Harlem restaurant Vinatería, realized she should prioritize marketing the eatery’s event space.
Looking at customer data all in one place demonstrated “how much additional revenue the larger parties represent in terms of our bottom line,” Leeper-Bueno said, and so events became “an area of focus.”
Although people interested in hosting an event could already fill out a form online, Leeper-Bueno felt the experience to be “a little impersonal.”
She asked Panso to add a few additional touches to the process to help develop a stronger relationship with potential customers right from the start.
Now, after filling out an interest form on Vinatería’s website, customers receive a thank-you note and a brochure via email detailing suggested menus and party ideas.
Leeper-Bueno also wanted to give event prospects the ability to instantly set up a call with her or someone on her team after filling out a form.
Panso made that happen by building an automated connection to a scheduling platform, a move Leeper-Bueno said she appreciated for how quickly the team responded to her custom need.
Feeding the soul
Establishing a personal connection with customers is important for any restaurant, but it’s been crucial to Vinatería’s success.
The restaurant has been open for 13 years. Over that period, Leeper-Bueno said, it has never engaged in any paid advertising. Instead, most of its customers learn about the restaurant via word of mouth and media coverage. (The New York Times and Forbes have both written features on the restaurant, and in one New York Post article, Lin-Manuel Miranda called it his “favorite spot” in Harlem, which has got to be worth more than any paid ad.)
But without paid advertising, it’s essential for a business to understand its customers backward and forward – and to maintain their loyalty.
Recently, Vinatería has been focusing on its guests who are high spenders, specifically on wine. “We can create special offers,” Leeper-Bueno said, “and eventually event offerings that we know will appeal to them based on previous spending patterns.”
In addition to the impact of events on its revenue, Vinatería has also come to appreciate the importance of web traffic. Since updating its site design with Panso’s tools, Leeper-Bueno said, it’s seen a spike in conversion of people looking at the site (particularly the menu) and coming into the restaurant or making reservations.
“People feast with their eyes,” she said, which is why it’s so important to have a website that showcases what the Vinatería tea
