The Benefits and Technical Challenges of Giving Customers Single User IDs
No one will argue that a high-performing tech stack is crucial to quick service and fast casual restaurant operations. It streamlines the flow of information between the front and back of the house, reduces errors, increases efficiency, and promotes a good customer experience.
There are multiple ways to ensure this information flow is working smoothly; one of them is assigning customers a single user ID within your restaurant’s ecosystem. This provides a variety of benefits, including enhancing personalization and influencing the guest’s path to purchase. It also increases your restaurant’s current and future ROI. But before we delve into the reasons why you’d want to assign customers unique user IDs, let’s explain what these IDs are and how they work.
What, Why & How: Single User ID Basics
A single user ID is exactly what it sounds like one ID for each user. This ID doesn’t change, no matter where the guest is interacting with your system. If they’re using an in-store kiosk, placing an order via an app, or making a reservation through the website, they’re always represented by the same ID.
This makes it much easier to manage guest info across systems, which results in fewer order errors, greater personalization, improved customer satisfaction, and a higher customer lifetime value. From a technical standpoint, it makes data collection, correlation, and analysis simpler and more effective. And from a management standpoint, it makes optimizing offers, loyalty membership perks, etc. much more straightforward.
Now we get to the challenging part: How does restaurant tech support single user IDs? The answer to that lies in your tech stack’s infrastructure.
Tech Stacks and Single User IDs
In essence, restaurant tech stacks come in three flavors: monolith, best of breed, and true order management systems. The type of tech stack architecture you have will determine how single user IDs for customers are implemented in your system – and how they work. All of these stacks support single user IDs, but they handle them differently.
Let’s start with the familiar monolith architecture. In this tech stack, all the various components (ordering, loyalty, couponing, etc.) are parts of one large, interdependent system. The components of this system cannot be separated.
In some ways, this is an effective approach; using the same ID across all components is automatic. In other ways, it’s ineffective; since components cannot be decoupled, there’s less flexibility and data is not meant to be shared or consumed outside the system. If you attempt, say, to add a third-party marketing solution, there are no outward-facing services that will let you easily share customer data between solutions.
In the best-of-breed model, restaurants assemble their own choice of solutions from various providers. You can get a payment system from provider X, an ordering system from organization Y, an ordering system from the market leader Z, and so on. Using the best combination of solutions offers more flexibility, but providers don’t always ensure that their offerings play well with others. Thus, it can require a lot of integration and collaboration to make this type of system work. This – along with high support and maintenance costs – translates into an expensive option.
For data sharing and single-user IDs, the best paradigm presents many challenges. A data-sharing layer (i.e. application programming interfaces) is often required, and even then data can become siloed or locked in its home channel. Also, data may not be fully available for customer segmentation, which reduces personalization and limits the ability to use customer data to shape individual guests’ purchase paths.
Finally, we have true order management systems (true OMS). These operate in a loosely coupled, tightly integrated service architecture. In other words, the various systems are not based on the same codebase, but they are fully integrated with each other. This offers flexibility similar to the best-of-breed model – you can choose the components that work best for your business – with more ability to share data across channels. It also offers fuller support for customer segmentation and personalization, which means it allows you to influence the path to purchase.
The downside of true order management systems is that they take longer to deploy than a monolith.
ID Syndication and the Tech Stack
Now that we’ve identified the major types of tech stacks, let’s talk about the mechanism behind single-user IDs. This is known as the syndication of ID – i.e. ensuring the same ID is used for the same people throughout all the systems in a restaurant tech stack.
In a monolithic system, there is no ID syndication because everything happens inside the system; there’s no need to integrate data with anything else (at least as far as the monolith’s designers are concerned). On the downside, all this data is locked in the system; this limits your choices regarding analytics, loyalty, etc. to what the system provides. This also limits your options in influencing customer paths to purchase.
In a best of breed system, data can often be locked within its provider system – e.g. loyalty data remains with the loyalty system, order data with the ordering system, etc. As we mentioned above, there are ways to break these silos, but they often require a lot of expense and time.
Interestingly, some providers of best-in-breed solutions actually design their tools to operate more like monoliths. In such cases, information-sharing solutions like customer data platforms may only have limited success.
True OMS systems support ID syndication internally (within the ecosystem) and externally (importing from third parties and exporting to other tools). This data can be used to create complete data repositories, which can then be used to power loyalty, ordering, analytics, and other solutions. This offers the most opportunity for influencing the order flow and path to purchase.
Why Single User IDs May Fail
As you can see, problems can arise when tech stacks can’t syndicate user IDs. It becomes much more difficult to share data from one part of the tech stack to another. In turn, this makes everything from data analysis to customer experience and guest personalization harder to complete and more prone to error.
The technical term here is “improper data syndication.” Data is only fully usable when it can be freely shared throughout the tech stack. Unfortunately, we see improper data syndication everywhere. Why? Largely because restaurants buy into point solutions. These make big promises, but such promises are hard to fulfill when the solution can’t fully integrate with the rest of the tech stack. Understanding how such solutions can and should work together requires a high degree of experience and expertise, and few operations have people onboard with the necessary background.
The result is what we call templated technology. It’s fast and easy to set up, but it comes with many limitations. It limits how well your data integrates. It limits your customization and order flow options. It can even affect your customer experience.
Given the complexity of restaurant tech stacks, you may wonder if fully integrating your data and deploying single user IDs for your customers is worth the hassle. Let’s examine six ways that single user IDs can positively impact your operations, customer service, and revenue.
6 Benefits of Giving Customers Single User IDs
The benefits of using single-user IDs for customers can be broken down into four areas:
Increased revenue:
● Customers place more orders.
● Check size is larger.
● Purchase frequency is higher.
Saves money:
● Reduces the number of employees needed to take orders.
● Reduces some of the workload on employees.
● Increases order accuracy, which results in less waste.
Enhances customer experience:
● Supports greater personalization.
● Promotes a seamless customer experience.
● Allows restaurants to craft their guest experience to local and individual preferences.
● Helps operators create more effective loyalty programs.
Provides a competitive advantage:
● Improves data management.
● Promotes customer satisfaction.
● Increases customer lifetime value.
● Results in more effective data analysis.
Let’s examine six of these areas in more detail.
1: Seamless customer experience
A single ID allows guests to access all your restaurant’s digital channels – from online ordering to delivery to loyalty programs – with just one set of login info. Just imagine how frustrating it would be for guests to have a separate login for each touchpoint. Easier is better.
Single-user IDs enhance the customer experience beyond simple ease of use. They also promote a seamless experience across digital channels. They help you track customer preferences and ordering behavior, which opens the door to greater personalization as well as richer data for you to analyze.
2: Improved data management
Just as an employee ID number links all kinds of employee information within a restaurant’s system, a single user ID links all the individual customer data. As we mentioned above, this makes personalization more effective, which translates to a more welcoming customer experience. It also makes it easier for restaurant operators to manage data within the tech stack.
However, we can also use user IDs to gain context in data analysis. For example, you might know that a certain menu item gets a lot of orders around 10 AM. But when you combine this with customer data, you can understand more about who is ordering that item and the relative sizes of the orders. You can use this information to craft personalized offers or loyalty rewards, among many other options.
3: More accurate order tracking
Let’s leave the big-picture world of data analysis and zoom down into the level of the individual order. How can a single user ID make a difference with just one order?
It all has to do with how data moves through the system. A single user ID can make it easier for customers to modify or cancel orders. Why? Because it makes it easier to track each order from the time it’s placed to the time it’s delivered to the customer. Linking orders to specific customers can help reduce errors and provide a better customer experience.
4: Less friction for employees
Likewise, a single user ID can make it easier for staff to manage customer orders for the same reasons we discussed above. Because the ID reduces the likelihood of mistakes, there’s less time wasted on fixing order errors. And the improved communication and order tracking make for more efficient operations.
5: Better loyalty programs
As we discussed in an earlier post on effective loyalty programs, a lack of personalization and worthwhile rewards are major reasons why loyalty programs fail.
A single user ID addresses both of these problems. But it also makes it easier for customers to log into their loyalty account, see what actions they need to take to hit the next reward, and plan their order accordingly. It also makes redeeming rewards simpler, regardless of the channel used. These may not seem like big wins by themselves, but they add up to a customer that feels seen, appreciated, and engaged – and one that’s more likely to stay loyal to your brand.
6: Influences Path to Purchase
Finally, a single user ID makes it easier to influence the customer’s purchasing path. This can both improve their experience and increase the restaurant’s revenue: a win-win.
How to Implement Single User IDs for Your Customers
Solving the problem of siloed customer data requires technical expertise. Depending on your tech stack, customers may or may not already have a single user ID for every transaction they make with your system. If you’re using a monolithic infrastructure, data is already shared between components. In this case, you might find it difficult to integrate any new components.
If you’re using a best in breed system, you’ll probably need some type of middleware to make data fully available across all components. Even if you’re using a true OMS, it can pay to have expert help in setting up system components so data travels freely.
Are you interested in the benefits of complete customer data? Contact Tillster today. We have the experience and technical knowledge to help you get the most out of your data.
