Current Restaurant Investments in Loyalty Programs

It’s no secret that restaurants need repeat customers for continued success. Retention is a vital aspect of the restaurant industry, especially since the pandemic. Loyalty Reward Programs are more than just a sound strategy; they can help boost a restaurant’s profits by 95% through repeat business.  

So, what can a great loyalty program due for a restaurant, and how does a restaurant set up a program for continued success? 

Barbara Castiglia of Modern Restaurant Management and Host of The Main Course podcast reached out to an expert in the loyalty field for some solid insights. 

Andrew Robbins knows a thing or two about what it takes to get it right. His engineering background fostered his attention to detail and ultimately led to his co-founding of Paytronix Systems, which provides state-of-the-art customer experience platforms. Robbins, the CEO of Paytronix, shared his experience as an engineer and how that background led him to better understand the customer experience and what restaurants needed. 

“A lot of people start a company because they want to start a problem that they see, and while you may not be inside the industry, I ate at a lot of restaurants and visited a lot of convenience stores,” Robbins said. “And you could see they wanted to replicate the local restaurant, a single-unit experience where the owner could know everyone. The owner could know you, what you like, and maybe something about your family, and when it was a special day. And how do you replicate that across three units, fifteen stores, and a hundred restaurants? It becomes a real challenge, and we wanted to help them do that.” 

Castiglia and Robbins’s conversation covers… 

•  What Paytronix does and how it works with clients 
• The evolution of new loyalty program options during, and resulting from, the pandemic 
• How restaurant retention grew during the pandemic because of having a loyalty program 

“There’s this notion of crossing the chasm,” Robbins said. “You start with the pioneers, the leading thinkers; you get the early adopters, the later adopters, and then everyone else. McDonald’s is the late to market entrant, and it’s just cemented the strategy everybody has to do. At this point, there’s no question; it’s not that it might be a good idea; you have to do it if you want to survive and compete.” 

Andrew Robbins is an MIT Mechanical Engineer and Harvard MBA who co-founded Paytronix Systems in 2001. Robbins ingrains passion, persistence, and empathy into the DNA of the Paytronix team. Paytronix continues to transform the industry with the explosion of information, data, and technology to deliver relevant, personal experiences to customers through a combination of online ordering, loyalty, omnichannel, messaging, AI insights, and payments all in one platform.