This isn't about putting names to faces, although guests obviously still love the personal touch. What I mean is the data behind their visits.

For instance, how many times have they visited or stayed with you in the last three months? How much do they tend to spend? How many friends do they bring with them? Do they dine in or spend time in the bar? How do they normally pay and in what currency? In other words, do you know who your most valuable customers are?

Ideally, you'd be able to break them down into various segments. Age, occupation, income, etc. The more you know about your guests the more you can tailor services and offers to them and that should mean more Dinngggg for your contactless payment terminals.

We recently worked with one of our Hospitality customers to help them capture more information about their guests than ever before.

Better insight

We've developed exclusive technology for them, which they've road tested and we've improved following their input. It's a great partnership and one we’re very proud of.

To cut a long story short, they told us that they wanted to improve the quality of the insight and the levels of understanding they have on their guests. They wanted to use this to make better informed business decisions - using this knowledge to help shape and develop their guest loyalty programme and rewards.

We went away and our smarts came up with an idea, where we could catch a lot more data about their guests with a bit of tech wizardry.

Appy members

They developed an app and we integrated our payments gateway into it. Guests could then download the app and input their personal and payment details. The beauty of the app is that the payment information is tokenised allowing the guest to use the app to make payments anywhere, from the bar to the restaurant. Tokenisation has the added advantage of keeping the guest's details secure, which is very reassuring for the card holder.

As payments are made our gateway captures the data, and here's the clever bit, it shares it with our customer's enterprise systems, like their customer relationship management (CRM) system or loyalty scheme.

In fact, we can give our customer more information than the card companies because of where we are harnessing the data from due to our role as a payments gateway provider.

Vital intelligence and rewards

Because our customer attracts a wide range of guests, assumptions were being made about which members were the most valuable. Some members who it was assumed were the most valuable in terms of food and drink sales, turned out not to be the biggest spenders.

In fact, it was more likely to be a business person who’s using the venue’s facilities four or five times a week for lunches, dinners and drinks.

The advantage of the app, and our integration of the information from it with other systems, is that this is much easier to see and as a result reward guests. Our customer can now offer incentives and discounts to the guests who are the most valuable.

Apart from the convenience the app offers, making payments smooth and frictionless, the plus-point for guests is that they can be confident their spending is being captured in one place and they know their loyalty will be rewarded. 

Widespread adoption

There is no reason why all chains, from bars and restaurants to hotels couldn't operate a similar system.

Think how valuable that information could be for your CRM or loyalty programmes. No more guesswork or assumptions.

Payments data turned into powerful insight that drives business growth. What's not to like about that?