Chopstix has seen its app drive customer spend up by around £1 per transaction, marketing director Rob Burns told Hostech.
He admitted that the Asian QSR brand had previously been focused too much on just getting the customer through the door, rather than engaging with them.
“Covid taught us a few lessons about loyalty and consumers and the fact we probably weren’t doing enough at the time,” he explained as part of a panel on promotions, loyalty and targeted marketing.
As the business is fast paced in terms of transaction time and turnover of customers, Burns said the time with which to engage with them instore was very limited, but through technology is has managed to extend the scope of the opportunity for engagement, past the four walls of the restaurant.
Chopstix started off with simple things like introducing internal wifi and then launched its app around seven months ago. Since being introduced it has accumulated around 150,000 downloads.
“We are seeing really good results from it in the initial stages.” He said the brand’s average spend is quite low given the nature of the offering, but with the app it is seeing customers spending around £1 more on every transaction.
And it has also seen frequency of visits increase from around 1.14 per month pre-launch to around 1.43 on average for users of the app, he explained.
“We think by the end of this year we can reach 300,000 downloads and can hopefully get to about 20% of spend in store coming through the app.”
In addition, it has also embraced asking customers for feedback and opening up a more two-way street in terms of communication, which he said was a big change for the brand.
Fellow panellist Mark Lilley, founder of Abokado and Chiktopia, said the pandemic had also offered a reset moment for the brand in terms of its digital journey. It has now introduced a digital loyalty app, which is fully integrated with its new kiosk ordering system and offers customers the same journey.
Lilley said the app, which is so far used by around 10,000 customers, had given it more data than it could ever hope for and it was in the early stages of assessing how it can use that data.
