H&C News meets with suppliers regularly to keep up to date with the latest product and service innovations, aiming to get the inside track on what companies offer to the market and how it is delivered.
This week, we met with Tom Boltman, Managing Director at Como® UK, to gain a better understanding of the customer loyalty business.
Tom Boltman, Managing Director at Como® UKThe Como solution, called Como Premium, powers loyalty programs at some of the world’s biggest brands, including Burger King, Papa Johns, Quiznos, Mr Pretzels, and Coca-Cola. It’s a brilliantly simple platform that helps restaurants and retailers engage their customers, reward them, and keep them coming back. Your restaurant or chain will have its own branded, mobile app for communicating with customers. But far beyond that, the platform collects and analyzes all the data about your customers’ activities, so that you can easily—in fact, automatically—run personalized campaigns and promotions that will increase your repeat business and sales.
Are businesses without loyalty schemes losing out?
Growing your business is what Como is all about. The main thing for restaurants to realize is that it can be up to 7x cheaper to retain customers you already have than to acquire new ones (Bain & Company), with 15% of the most loyal customers driving 55-70% of a retailers’ revenue (Northwestern University).
That’s where Como steps in to empower you to build the lasting customer relationships that build business success. Como Premium offers an efficient, fun, and interactive way of rewarding and creating loyal customers.How does Como Premium work?
We build a customized app for any business or restaurant we work with. So instead of spending lots of money outsourcing development, you get a branded app for iPhone and Android users with your own branding, look, and feel.
You’ll use the app to connect directly with your customers, through loyalty schemes like stamp cards, coupons, points, gifts, and push notifications. You can also use our marketing automation tools that allow you to effortlessly promote targeted deals and content.
Once we help you incentivize your customers to download the app, and because we’re integrated directly into your POS systems, we can start collecting the customer data that you’ll use in your control panel. The platform can then turn that data into actionable insights and targeted promotions that are delivered directly to your customers’ mobile phone, driving commercial growth and adding a whole new dimension to your business’s marketing capabilities.
What does Como Premium offer restaurants?
I can’t think of a business where it’s more essential. The restaurant world is a very competitive landscape; everyone is competing for the attention and budget of very discerning customers. It can be pretty expensive marketing-wise, and very difficult to track whether the marketing budget was converted into sales.
By having a powerful loyalty function, you can first—know with certainty who the people are who are choosing to engage with your brand, and second—track how much they are spending and how often. This gives you phenomenal insight not only into how successful your business is, but also into how your promotions and your marketing efforts are performing. We believe this impact will grow even further as we bring our new integrated online ordering and geo-location beacon features online. In the 21st century, businesses with a data-driven loyalty capability will have a major competitive advantage.
How do restaurants use the business insights they get with Como Premium?
In todays’ digital world, gathering and acting on valuable customer data is critical—and this is Como Premium’s core strength. Our platform gives you endless ways to slice and dice the information that you’ll have about the customers.
One of the unique things about Como Premium is the way we enable you to send out the right incentives at the right time to the right people. For example, you can identify who your VIP customers are and reward them with the most tempting offers. Or, by understanding the buying habits of different types of customers, you can offer them extra points on the specific type of beers or hamburgers they can’t resist.
Beyond rewards—comes content. Our platform lets you promote content according to different customer categories. Every single segment of your customer base (gender, age, people who like a certain product or have certain purchasing behavior) can receive unique and tailored content, making each app different for each customer.
Can you give us some day-to-day examples?
Our clients give us new examples every day. The great thing about Como Premium is that restaurants can really use it to find their specific pain spots, apply exactly the right cure, and drive growth. For instance, we have a burger chain called BBB with more than 320,000 members in their loyalty club. They turned the quietest day of the week into the second busiest by creating a compelling incentive. It really drove people in, and now the Como platform is a mainstay of their marketing strategy.
A chain here in the UK, Seafood Pub Company, uses our platform to fill up empty tables: They send deals via push notifications to their loyalty club members in the afternoon about promotions for that evening.
Do restaurants need a dedicated technical team to run the program?
Not at all! Como Premium is easy to manage for anyone, but most importantly, you’ll have a dedicated business adviser who will help you with technical bits of the product and provide you with creative ideas and insights to help you grow your business. This service is a core part of what makes Como Premium such a valuable solution for our customers.
For more information or to see a demo, please click here
You can also email us or call Como’s UK offices at +442031500523