When I started at LOKE some 6 years ago the job of the Client Services team was largely to help convince and bring merchants on the journey of digitisation.

There was still a perception in the market that customers did not want to add credit cards to mobile devices and that technology negatively disrupted the traditional hospitality experience. The benefits of the LOKE product back then, Loyalty and Marketing, were enough to bring early adapters onboard and start seeing the change, but we still faced objections day in day out.

HOW THINGS HAVE CHANGED!

Over the following 5 years, we saw that change increasing in pass until the crescendo that has been Covid. Market leaders like Gelato Messina, Australia Venue Company and Chargrill Charlies in Australia, BrewDog and City Pubs in UK, Ya Kun in Singapore and Good George Brewing in New Zealand not only adapted LOKE technology but influenced how we started to develop features based on their experiments, successes and failures. What was clear was that the market was starting to adapt and embrace technology as an enhancement of the hospitality experience.

Loyalty has always been the focus of LOKE’s product, but Ordering was proving to be the tool that brought business on the digital journey. Never one to fall behind, LOKE invested in partnering with Ordering companies and developing our own ordering platform in the years preceding 2020’s revolution.

Over those last 2-3 years, coinciding with LOKE’s growth into Singapore and UK, Ordering has shifted from a trend focused on customers placing orders before they arrive at the venue to now becoming a centrepiece of many hospitality operators’ business as usual.

Last weekend I visited a LOKE venue with 200 seats that use LOKE exclusively for payments. Using LOKE’s Check-in Payments at the counter, LOKE’s Order at Table in the outdoor areas and both Order Ahead and Delivery for customers before they arrive at the venue. It has been a revolution that has been some years in the making but in my eyes, Covid has only accelerated what was an inevitable future since we started changing perceptions all those years ago.

As the market adapts, the new customer experience is seen as an enhancement to the hospitality experience - this has lead to more and more venues wanting to learn about their customers’ behaviour.

The new misconception is that all the data captured via the technology is difficult to use.

LOKE makes this part easy.

LOKE has been developing tools and techniques to use customer data to; increase average spend, drive up frequency, engage customers with the experience of the brand, upsell, reward loyal customers, reduce staff costs, reduce waste, and more than anything maximise every marketing dollar for the greatest return. Now that customers are able to use our technology to pay every time they are in a venue, these tools and techniques are being put to the most use. Our clients, both those who have been with us for years and those who have just joined us are seeing amazing results - customer satisfaction is up, marketing spend is directly tied to increased revenue and the hospitality sector is ready for the post-Covid-19 digital world.

- David Renouf, Global Head of Client Services