topic Re: Loyalty in Guest Experience

Loyalty

JimmyD99 — Thu, 25 Jan 2024 01:34:07 GMT

Is anyone using any of the integration partners for loyalty? Any feedback would be great. Just looking for something more than what Toast offers.

Re: Loyalty

au79teahouse — Thu, 25 Jan 2024 01:42:06 GMT

What exactly are you looking for? We have tried to partner with Incentivio but it did not work out at the end.

Re: Loyalty

JimmyD99 — Thu, 25 Jan 2024 04:03:47 GMT

More options. Toast is either just dollars off or items but that's limited. What didn't work with Incentivo?

Re: Loyalty

au79teahouse — Thu, 25 Jan 2024 06:18:40 GMT

Most third party integration companies that focus on CRM, marketing, and loyalty program do have much better features and flexibility comparing to Toast loyalty program. Take Incentivio for example. Incentivio allows you to send time sensitive offers to a target customers by different criteria such as how often they visit and by target rules such as age, gender, check in, message share, geo location, referral, etc. In a nutshell, Incentivio is great for marketing.

We stopped working with Incentivio because of many technical and integration issues and lack of communication from the Incentivio team. Our initial setup was expected to finish in 4 to 6 weeks but it took almost 13 weeks and that's after I kept putting pressure on them "many" times. We really had a hard time getting hold on to our case manager either by phone call or email so we couldn't get any help from our case manager at all. Their back-end configuration is very limited and not intuitive. If I wanted to change some setting on the back-end, I had to tell our case manager to make the changes. There was a major flaw on how they transferred customer's information from Toast to Incentivio, which caused a lot of our customers' account couldn't be located. Unlike Toast, it's very difficult to trace, manage, or adjust a transaction or an account on Incentivio's back-end. We did not have all these issues when we first moved to Toast from our old pos provider.

I used to complaint about Toast and its customer support a lot in the past. But after the experience with Incentivio, I realize Toast isn't that bad at all, at least Toast has every basic features/functions I need and I have full control on most of the configuration.

TL;DR: Toast provides working basic features/functions that a restaurant needs. If you already use Toast loyalty program and want to use third party integration for more advanced features, make sure you know exactly what you need/want and expect there will be many integration issues that cannot be resolved or need workarounds that make your current workflow even more complicated.

Re: Loyalty

JimmyD99 — Thu, 25 Jan 2024 14:14:27 GMT

Thanks for the info. How log ago were these issues with Incentivo?

Re: Loyalty

rcmck — Fri, 26 Jan 2024 00:56:21 GMT

I don't use them but just based on my experience as a customer at restaurants that do, if I were to switch to another loyalty company that integrates with toast I'd take a look at paytronix. I have also had a good experience with a couple of local restaurants groups that recently switched to toast and used paytronix with their old systems. Everything seemed to just work with no issues for guests or employees.

Re: Loyalty

au79teahouse — Fri, 26 Jan 2024 01:04:00 GMT

Not long ago. We signed up in later July 2023 and launched the week before Thanksgiving 2023. Ran for a week and called stop to it.

Re: Loyalty

LauraBagel72 — Mon, 17 Mar 2025 22:42:15 GMT

You speak the truth. Everything you said we have experienced. Incentivio has the worst customer service I have ever in my 51 years of restaurant service have ever seen. How about this...our stores open at 6:30 am and my rep was on the West coast and would never answer until noon (we are on the East coast) if we had any issues we wouldn't hear from them until way after noon. I have no problems working long hours but after 14 hours of work I do need to sleep at some point! If I wasn't available when they finally answered, I never got my issues fixed!And when they are done, they just stop working and won't pick it up until their next shift! Finally got an East coast rep, but it is really no better.

The Incentivio integration team just does not understand the process that Toast uses on the POS. I had two Incentivio techs last Friday that told me two different ways to fix a discount issue we were having. And for some reason that no one will admit to, all of the sudden the Incentivio techs had no access to Toast to see why the discount was not working. There are a very few techs that are really good, but it is a crap shoot if you can get them. Very disappointed as Incentivio was recommended to us by Toast when we signed. We were going to switch to Toast for our online ordering but we have over 80K customers that have virtual gift cards loaded on our App that Incentivio provides and Toast has no way of bringing them over. There gift card program is not on the same level yet that everyone else is. You can never go backwards. The future will be no cash, our customers love the virtual gift cards especially when we give them value for their loyalty and bonuses at Christmas with promotions.

Wish we could find someone who does it all, and well!

Re: Loyalty

www — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 16:41:00 GMT

Rather than start a new thread, I'll just bump up this one.

I'm wondering what the status of 3rd Party Loyalty programs are like in 2025?

Does the integration allow points to be used directly on Toast Online Ordering and Toast Kiosk?

Re: Loyalty

au79teahouse — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 18:36:35 GMT

I remember it has been available for awhile. Here is the Toast article I found about it. It seems it will require online order pro for it to work. https://central.toasttab.com/s/article/Toast-Online-Ordering-Pro-Third-Party-Loyalty

For kiosk, I think only third party gift works at the moment. Not sure about loyalty.

Re: Loyalty

www — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 00:53:58 GMT

Thank you!