The Teahouse, a chain of traditional Taiwanese cream teahouses in the Houston area, faced a problem familiar to many growing retailers. Keeping tabs on multiple locations that differed slightly from each other in menu setup, layout and prices was becoming an operational challenge. Additionally, Teahouse wanted a more organized way of managing its Teahouse Rewards loyalty program, which offers customers a free drink for every $40 they spend.
The retailer, which currently operates 10 locations, deployed a POS and store management solution from Revel Systems in late 2015, and then added the Spendgo customer engagement solution in January 2017. The combination has provided Teahouse with multiple benefits, including:
• Easier access to sales data from multiple locations;
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• Simplified processes for pushing changes from a centralized backend;
• Drastically reduced need for manual intervention in loyalty program management;
• Easier tracking of rewards usage due to a more visual user interface; and
• Improved ability to correlate rewards usage and overall sales performance on a store-by-store basis.
Spendgo also provided Teahouse with a simpler customer-facing interface for the loyalty program. Since its launch, the loyalty program has added more than 112,000 new members, averaging approximately 10,000 members per Teahouse location. The retailer is planning to open two new stores in Q2 2018, and is considering adding a mobile version of the loyalty dashboard in the future.
“We had previously used another loyalty program [provider], but challenges arose when customers forgot to enter their phone number at the point of sale,” said Aria Pramesi, Operations Director at The Teahouse. “With Spendgo and their customer support, I have figured out a semi-automatic way of doing things by creating a bot on our internal communications chat platform that can request these adjustments.”
Automating Loyalty Program Management
The move to Spendgo has reduced Pramesi’s workload around the loyalty program “to the point where I can let it work automatically without much intervention on my part,” he said in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “Tracking rewards usage is significantly easier now — I can just log in to Spendgo’s dashboard and see things directly in graph form, instead of sorting data and creating the visuals myself.”
Teahouse executives also have gained a clearer picture of how the loyalty program affects the overall business. “I can actually see the utilization rate of the rewards, track which stores’ customers use the rewards and see a direct correlation between rewards usage and overall sales performance,” said Pramesi.
As the business continues to expand, Pramesi values the control that the Revel Systems solution provides. “I can now make changes using a centralized backend where I can just push changes to all locations, so multiple unit management is definitely easier,” he said. “Employee management is also a breeze, and I deploy Revel for new stores without any problems.”
