Loyalty

[JimmyD99]

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

[au79teahouse]

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

[JimmyD99]

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

[au79teahouse]

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.

[JimmyD99]

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