Ways to Offer Unreasonable Hospitality with Your Mobile Ordering App

Hey, everyone, this is Tomer Malovinsky, CEO and co founder of Per Diem, and this is our weekly webinar. We're here every Wednesday. And so today we're going to be talking about unreasonable hospitality and ways you can enable tech to really deliver hospitality to your guests. And specifically Per Diem, but other tools and systems that you have as well. Yeah, so let's jump right in in terms of the agenda. Just a little intro into unreasonable hospitality and Will Guidera, who. Who kind of coined the term, and then just diving deep into that and taking that theme and ways that you could potentially provide unreasonable hospitality. It all starts with knowing your customers, the ability to segment certain customers, whether it's your VIPs or others within Per Diem itself. It's sending. One thing you can do is send personalized push notifications and just leverage that whole system and your system of communications discounts, different types of discounts you can give promo codes. We have updates on the product side on promo codes, too. Subscriptions, obviously, we've talked about that before, but just showing you a few examples of how some of our customers are using subscriptions to really deliver. And then we'll go deeper and we'll just talk about some other strategies that you can use as well. Again, this is more geared towards giving you some, like, a little bit of guidance and just. But probably most, most of the ideas. You guys know your cafes, your restaurants the best. So ultimately this is just kind of like consolidating a lot of information and then you guys can go and do the. The magic in your own businesses. So who is Will Guidera? He was the chef owner of 1111 Madison Park. It was rated one of the best restaurants in the world. I is the best restaurant in the world. And he really became famous outside of the restaurant for coining this term. And it all started in his restaurant, and hence the earlier picture of the show the bear and him reading Will Guerra's book. They took a scene of that from the book, but it all started around him delivering a meal to a couple of, like, tourists. They were foodies and he overheard them talking that they had the best trip, but they just didn't have a New York City hot dog. And so he heard this and then he went and he got a hot dog from the hot dog vendor down the street. And, you know, they chef it up really nicely and did a nice little ketchup and mustard drizzle on it. And they took it out and obviously the guests were flabbergasted and. And so he Personally, it opened up his eyes because he had never seen that type of reaction from a guest before. And he's serving the best meals in the world. And here he was serving a $2 hot dog at one of the fanciest restaurants there are, and he got this kind of response. So then he then took that and said, how can we incorporate that into just the way we give service and how we think about how we were treating our guests? And so what it all comes down to, you know, and he's got a great TED Talk, which you can listen to in a great book, but when you think about it, it comes down to really being present. So, and that's one thing that the app really helps you do. If you have to take a million orders, a shift that you're. You're running around, you're constantly in the weeds, but if you're really, you know, if things are a little more at tempo and you're really present and you can be there with your guests, your customers, you know, then. Then you really have the opportunities to give these additional, you know, hospitable moments, if you will. Personalizing the experience. Obviously, you can do that a lot through data and, and utilizing the app and square. And then comes down to, at the end of the day, like, you gotta actually care. You gotta actually want to do these things because they're not free. You actually have to do work. But the good news is once you do the work, you can kind of, with today's technology, you can automate a lot of these things. So once you have done that work, you know, you can kind of put these a little bit on autopilot. And at the end of the day, I think what he's all about, and it's what you all are all about, is just how you make people feel. So if somebody orders and they get their perfect drink at the perfect time, and you're just making them feel that much better, whether it's putting a little note on their pickup order or whatever it is, you know, and you guys know all the tricks, then that's what it's all about. And that's what brings people back. And I think you guys know the rest. So jumping right in, how to get to know your customers, it's all about just leveraging tech. So what we've done recently in per diem is we've added a dashboard you can drill down on, you know, who your best customers are. You can get this in square as well. So we'll give you on a. On a daily, weekly, monthly basis. You can get this information now in per diem you can see who's. If you're running our subscriptions, you can see who's subscribed. If you're running our referral program, you can see who's referred other customers. That gives you opportunities to dive deeper into your guests. I started my career at OpenTable. We were notorious for giving restaurants like Eleven Madison park initially just on each reservation, an area to put guest notes and guest tags so that when they did walk in the door and their reservation was right there, you knew that Johnny so and so like to drink merlot or whatever it was, or that so and so is a vegan or what have you. So that really helped to, to, you know, in terms of like fine dining. But you guys have opportunities to do this in your establishments as well. So getting those customer insights, who are your top customers? Who's redeeming different types of rewards? How many rewards do your guests have? You know, I remember again at OpenTable, I remember someone telling me like, oh, I have 80,000 points. And in my mind I was thinking, I don't know if that's good because that means they haven't used their points. So why aren't they using their points if they have 80,000 points, what are they doing? Are they referring other customers? Stuff like that. So again, you can get this both within per diem, you can get this data within square, you can see what people are ordering and there's a lot of reporting you can do. And just doing that extra deep dive will give you insights, will help you uncover things that maybe you didn't notice before, like certain, like top selling drinks or when people are ordering what these give you opportunities later on to personalize that experience and to, you know, if you know, Marley comes in every day and now you know their drink or you know what they like, you know, their, the modifier, you know that they get oat milk instead of regular milk, whatever it is. That extra touch I think matters to people and today more than ever and then instant feedback. So we've gotten, you know, we added this feature a while ago based on feedback from, from you guys and it's really, we've seen some of our busier places that really utilize this the best and they're really maniacal about customer support and service. So we automatically send you. And I say maniacal in a good way in that sense, like they're on top of it. But we send you an email if it's a one or two star review and then we'll list out all the reviews as Square does as well in your dashboard. So you could go through those, see what people are saying. If you see someone's comment and you see them in the store the next day, the next week, it'd be a great thing to acknowledge that comment, say, hey, I saw your rating. You know, these are only internal ratings. Thanks so much. That means the world, you know, or you know, if for some chance you didn't get something right and you know, last time they didn't, you know, making sure and taken that, that double effort to make sure, hey, just wanted to make sure, you know, things are good with you and, and what have you. So it's oftentimes just like checking in after that, even if it was a few experiences ago that they had like a negative experience, then I think that's certainly another way that you can leverage that. So really, I think using this, using the notes that you get within both here and you know, it could be like your Google Maps reviews as well. Even though this is going to be more personalized, obviously. Cool. So segmenting for VIP treatment, you can see here within Square for those of you who use like Square's email marketing and stuff like that, then you can segment certain groups and then we will also support those groups in per diem and they're supported in other ways in Square. And so you don't only have to do this for your VIPs, but you can do this for everything. You can segment certain groups by location, certain groups by like types of drinks they order, maybe stuff like that. So, and again, this is what I was mentioning in terms of a lot of giving this unreasonable hospitality is having the data at your hands to be able to know and to personalize certain experiences. And that just makes it easier for you to give unreasonable hospitality as part of your everyday, you know, just work so you don't have to like try too hard to do it. So obviously Square customer groups, you can set these up. There's a lot of different ways that you can, you can go about this. Again, you can do it on a. If you see that certain customers order at a certain location or certain customers that order, you know, more than a couple of days a week and you want to add a special group just so you can message them and offer them special things, I think that's, you know, certainly a great way to go about it. I think you guys, whether it's a friends and family thing. So again, whatever you want, you can create these groups and then you can message them separately, whether it's in squares, email marketing, whether it's in per diem. And there's even more that you can do with these marketing groups as well. And I think they'll become more and more powerful over time. And then one of those things that you can do is send personalized push notifications. So for instance, our birthday notifications, which some of you may not use because you use Square's birthday notifications and that's fine. But let's say, you know, let's say your VIPs, like your Uber, Uber VIPs. Let's say you want to give them a little extra on their birthday, but, well, great. Well, you can have that marketing group set up and then you can set up a birthday notification in per diem and just send it to really those guests, hey, here's a little something extra special for you this year. You know, and so that's, that's one way to personalize those. We see a lot of people, hey, it's raining out. It's that kind of day. You know, the good news is a lot of you that are running coffee shops or whatever, whether it's good weather or bad weather, you can always tell a story around that, right? It's raining, it's cold. Hey, come warm up. It's hot, it's whatever. Hey, come get a nice coffee. And so I think those work really well. And then time based events too. Whether, you know, there's a game on this weekend that's really big or, you know, football's right around the corner, that type of thing, or just, you know, events that are happening in your area. Those are also great ways where again, they connect a little bit more than just like, Hey, $2 off. Not that $2 off is bad, those work really well. But again, if you can connect that $2 off to maybe something that's going on, then more people are going to react to that $2. So again, a big part of unreasonable hospitality is personalizing the experience. Push notifications are the, you know, what's more personal than something popping up on your phone, on the home screen? And so this is a huge opportunity for you guys, you know, to think creatively and to do something special. Targeted offers and rewards. So same way, by creating these marketing groups within Square, really a lot of this happens. But you know, you can do days where, hey, you're offering double points. Square now offers tiered rewards too. So obviously you can leverage that in per diem too. You can do things like that. So if you're using square loyalty, let's say you just Want to turn on a certain day, hey, today anybody who orders through the app, you get an extra five points for every order. You can just turn that on for a single day. Again, maybe you just want to target your best. You know, maybe you have that marketing group of your VIPs and you just, hey, you're so awesome. I just want to give you something extra today so you could just target those individuals and do that as well. And I don't know how much you are familiar with this, but a lot of social media is built on this theory and it's, it works because obviously, but, but the concept is that, you know, rewards can be very predictable and inevitably when you get to that hundred points threshold and you get your free cup of coffee or whatever it is, the excitement is actually getting there and it's almost a letdown when you get the reward in a way because you're like, oh my God, I've been working on this so long and all I got was this cup of coffee where. And that's just like psychology has nothing to do with the reward or anything else. It's just like you've been building and the reward never seems like. It's like they say on vacations, the best day of the vacation is like the day before the vacation when you're really excited about it. So, so anyhow, but if, but if those are less kind of if it's just out of the blue kind of thing, if it's not like, hey, you got to 10 points, so here's your reward. But it's like, hey, you're awesome because of this or hey, I saw you, you know, maybe you notice somebody, you know, again, your top spender in your store. Hey, thanks so much for stopping in. As much as you have been this last week, we really appreciate it. Here's a little something extra. I wasn't expecting that. I didn't hit the whatever reward tier to get that. But now in my mind, and this is where the social media companies use this, I don't know when I'm going to get that next reward. So I end up using it a lot more with, in the back of my mind, I might get this like surprise reward all of a sudden. So again, it's not trying to, we're not trying to be manipulative or something like that. But, but, but I think these things really do work and people appreciate that a lot more and that's why they kind of work as well. So those are just some, some ideas and some thoughts around how you can leverage rewards and offers. Obviously you can do this with points, you can do double points, and you can even give groups of customers a certain percent off certain categories or what have you. Again, you want to think these things through. You don't want to just do them willy nilly. But there are opportunities for you to, to enable these types of deals. So a few examples, we thought coffee dose. So again, talking about like customer reviews, seeing somebody who wanted light ice and just acknowledging that, like, how awesome is that that I got, you know, hey, on your, your next visit, like, we're gonna make sure that this is right. I thought that was great. Great example of just one way to give unreasonable hospitality palace coffee. Just like acknowledging. Again, thanks so much for giving us that review. I think that's great. Really nice. You know, again, I feel good because you're my local spot and I want to contribute to your success. And then just getting that acknowledgment feels nice. And then Starbucks does this really well, you know, whether it's around your birthdays and stuff like that. And they actually customize things around your birthday, even promoting, like maybe your special drink. And so we do have an update on that where I'll be talking about that in just a second when we talk about discounts and promotions. So in terms of promo codes, today, you can create promo codes. And you know, I think you can create a certain use, they can expire at a certain time and stuff like that. But what we are adding, which I think will add to this theme of unreasonable hospitality, and we've gotten a lot of requests from you guys around this is adding a promo code for an individual item. And this again opens the opportunity for you guys. Again, you can just do a blast one day where you have a new item and you do a promo code for that item. And great. And that's, that's awesome. But think about taking this to the next level where let's say you were doing birthday push notifications. Well, and let's say you ran a report on everyone's most ordered drink, everyone that has more than X amount of orders. And then you create marketing groups for each one of those. Right? And then maybe you can create promo codes, birthday promo codes with that drink. And then on their birthday, you know, they get a message from you through the app with, hey, you know, happy birthday. Here's your whatever it is, vanilla latte or whatever they love. You know, that's that just going that one extra step again to get there. You have to get that data. That's where the work comes in. That's where actually, you know, caring about this stuff comes in. But if you do that pre work it becomes pretty easy because then you just have a marketing group and then you're just assigning everybody that loves certain drink to that group. And, and then you can offer that type kind of at scale too. You can do it at scale. So again, this is a way that you can customize things, you know, personalize the experience, but to a larger segment of your, of your customer base. And then square discounts, you know, we mentioned these, you can set up category discounts, customer group discounts and quantity specific discounts. So you know, I think here the customer group discounts, it's interesting if you are able to segment. You know, I think the most natural are VIP is obviously friends and family, stuff like that. These just FYI, once you set these up, they're going to apply everywhere. So they're going to apply in store, they're going to apply in the app and what have you. So whether it is a buy one, get one free deal, whether it is like, you know, you have a segmented group and you're giving them some sort of deal, then that's going to be again when they check out in the point of sale and also in the app. But that's a great way to personalize as well, gamification. So we've recently added the spin the wheel feature. Again, a nice thing whether you want it to have it permanently on or turn it on. Maybe on a given day as kind of a little fun surprise like hey, we're just going to turn it on. Doesn't matter what spend you have, you get to spin the wheel or hey, spend over 20 bucks and get to spin the wheel. So again, gamified experiences. We're thinking of other ways to incorporate gamification into the app. Just as an extra hook and just to create that extra sense. So anyhow, this is another way obviously where people can feel a little special and different and unique and we've had a lot of success with it limited time products. So I think around here whether you're using push notifications to push those products. And one tool that's really cool if you guys have category schedule set up or just you're using like inventory, then we've added recently this, this notify feature where basically if, if you only start selling this product at a certain time of day, let's say it's breakfast item or whatever it is, or it's just some kind of role that's really popular, then people can tap the notify and then they're going to get a push notification once it's back in stock or once it's selling. So again, a great way, you know, whether it's a high demand item, a new item to get people really engaged, and then just to remind them automatically when that item is back in stock. We used to have this feature. I used to work at Resi as well. And this is one of our most popular features in terms of just people who wanted a table at a certain restaurant and they weren't able to get in, but they'd set that notify and then they'd get a, you know, a push once the table was open and it was wildly successful and really, really a popular feature. So a few examples here. Pasta de Guy incentivizing loyalty. So updates to your loyalty program. Obviously, just wanting to let people know, hey, here's what's going on. We have a new item on our loyalty program. You know, and maybe again, this is something where if you did have segmented lists around my favorite items or something like that, like, maybe it's just me, like, you know, I love mozzarella sticks. So it's like, hey, Tomer, your mozzarella. You know, we now added this to loyalty. Again, I'm not saying you have to do those things, but that's where you kind of get into that unreasonable hospitality zone. Subscriptions. So this is a great way too. Obviously, Panera has kind of cracked the code on this. We've done a webinar on it. But it does have that, you know, it's that Costco, I'm a member of the club. I feel special kind of feeling. And so I think leveraging this, if you are running subscriptions, we think it's a great way. We also merchandise part of the app where people can leverage it in store as well. So it can act as kind of a pass. So a few different clubs that we've seen, the Fresh Baguette Club, they run a membership for 10 bucks a month. And basically you get all their coffee, all their Espresso drinks at 50% off and you get all their pastry and food items at 15% off. They've seen that. They've seen about an increase in 30% of foot traffic for customers who are subscribed. And yeah, and it's been really successful. So we just launched this with them a week or so ago, but they have. They already had like 2,000 existing members to their program. And then now with their current program. The unfortunate part was it wasn't really tied to the rest of their menu, it was just around coffee. But given that they're a French bakery and make this, you know, amazing baguettes and croissants, they wanted to sell more food through the program. So hence them using per diem and enabling this entire experience through their app, Prevail Union. So this is a little bit of a higher tiered subscription where you actually get free drinks a couple times a day. So one free item every hour you can get and then a max of three per day. And this starts at 50amonth. And then there is another, there is another tier. There's an annual tier as well. Obviously I, I've mentioned this before as well. We drew a lot of inspiration from this from Panera, obviously here locally in New York from Blank Street Coffee. I did the Blank street subscription, it's called Regulars. While we were building out this feature and I can tell you I was totally addicted, I would schedule my entire day. It, it's quite unique in that sense. So these programs, especially when there are free drinks involved, they can be quite sticky and create a nice experience. So you want to think them through, you want to make sure the ROI is there. But obviously what Panera has learned is if you're going to be in my store three times a day, then more than likely you're going to be ordering additional things from my store. And so that just creates this whole, you know, happy feeling for everyone. And then Tven. So this is a store that we actually have in France right outside of Paris. And so they, they've actually built in more of an event kind of thing. So they're hosting this running club and so you're going to come to the running club and then afterwards there's going to be like a spread and stuff like that. So again, a unique twist. Totally what I wouldn't expect for from my like local tea place, but very cool. And so this is a promotion that they're starting to run now totally outside the box. And you know, so here's a little bit of a European example for you guys as well. And then just a few additional things that we've seen that, that, that we've seen work. Obviously, early access to new items. So again, this is something too where, where you know, potentially you are leveraging whether it's like VIP groups or, or you know, you can leverage like your categories and like assigning certain customer groups to categories and giving certain people access to certain things. Or it's as simple as just like sending out a push notification to certain members saying that Something's available now when, when you are doing something like this, then you know, we recommend, you can obviously put it in the carousel in the app to make sure the image, you know, if it's something that you want to push that the image is up towards the top of the screen in that category, maybe you want to upsell the item as well. And then obviously just leveraging push notifications, your email marketing, you know, and all your other online assets to move these items. So I think that's one opportunity that we see dedicated pickup lines, you know, I'm sure you guys have already figured this out. Were actually adding now it'll be in an upcoming version. But this came in through a customer request through Palace Coffee, I think where they have different instructions for, they have four stores. Each store has different, you know, instructions for where you should pick up your coffee. So actually after you place your order there's going to be custom instructions there and if you have a dedicated line or, or whatever the instructions are, you can put them there. But obviously making the people who, you know, I think Starbucks is kind of doing a lot of this now, but making the people who order through your app, you know, a making sure they understand where to pick things up and then, you know, and if they feel a little special, then I don't think there's anything wrong with that as well. And then we haven't, you know, eventually we're going to build this in and build some nice like data science around this and, and so we're going to put our AI hats on and sprinkle some, you know, some, some OpenAI fairy dust on it. But you know, in the meantime, you guys can see what are some of my best customers getting? You know, what are they ordering? As I mentioned, we're going to be able to do pretty soon item based promotion codes. So you're going to be able to say, hey Tomer, I noticed you get the iced latte all the time. Here's a coupon just for you for the iced latte. So that's something that's coming soon eventually. Like I said, we'll be able to personalize a lot of this. But you guys can do this. You know, that's where this goes in. At least with like some of your best customers. What are they ordering? And again, you can take some of those, maybe you create a marketing group for everyone who's ordered a special drink or something like that. And, and you can do something and you can incorporate that into messaging somehow, whether it's a personalized birthday notification or whatever it is. Again, we will be doing something on our side eventually with this. But, you know, you guys have all this data. You know the order history. We make it easy for people to just reorder items. But I think recognition on certain occasions, you know, that I come to your store every day and that I get the. Whatever drink I get, you know, giving me a little something and an acknowledgement there, you know, it just makes me feel good. So just another way, just another idea. Yeah. So that's. That's all the agenda we have today. I don't know if there are any questions out there. Happy to jump in and do. And to demo any of the things we talked about, if that's of interest. So I'll just hush up for a second. All right, well, I guess that wraps up another week. Thanks for joining. Yeah, and thanks for Woguidera. He really, I think, opened a lot of people's eyes with this. I highly recommend the TED Talk. I'll be honest, I haven't read the book, but I should read the book. But nonetheless, you should read the book, too. So, anyhow, thanks everyone for joining. Have a great week. We'll see you next time. Bye now.