Sushi Restaurant Chain with Loyalty

Sushi-ya is a young but rapid-growing sushi restaurant chain based in Penang, Malaysia. Growing from nothing to 5 restaurants in less than 2 years resulted in the need for digital technology to support the growth.

CHALLENGES

While Sushi-ya is generally favorable due to its friendly price points, strategic locations and large varieties, the food & beverage business is especially challenging in the city that is famous globally for its food choice and quality. Sushi-ya spoke to Emanon about the key challenges they wish to address. Primarily, they wish to ensure sustainable growth for the restaurant business by focusing on the ability to engage customers proactively and build customer loyalty.

SOLUTIONS

Emanon’s team had various discussions and brainstorming sessions with the team at Sushi-ya and eventually clearly defined the objectives and strategies to achieve it, with the allocated resources.

The team agreed to develop an application that allows restaurant customers to sign-up as members to be entitled to various members-only promotions. On top of that, members can also choose to purchase or redeem special members-only rewards after having completed various actions, such as “On every third purchase” and more. The application not only allows members to enjoy special privileges but also served as a platform for the restaurants to engage the members as necessary to promote future campaigns.

Most importantly, the application also allows their members to store monetary value in their respective accounts for ease of payment and spending history. Having balances in the members' account, it encourages their members to return to any of the restaurants in the future as the value is consumable in any restaurant.

In order to be prudent and not over-extending the investment, the entire application was designed and developed to be web-based. Web-technologies has been proven to be reliable due to its long existence. For the same reason, it is also a relatively less expensive technology, yet having the ability to build a cross-platform application that works on almost any device. This naturally became the perfect choice of technology for the situation.

Last but not least, the application is a modular system by design. This opens up the opportunity for Sushi-ya to extend the platform to an even compressive solution for e.g. the data and transaction can be used to provide meaningful business insight, assisting business decisions as required.

OUTCOME

With this approach, the team managed to deliver both the web-based customer-facing mobile application at the same time the outlet dashboard for outlet-to-outlet operation such as accepting payment, top-up value, reward, and voucher redemption, etc.

Since it’s a web application, accessibility is much better than mobile apps as it does not require any installation. Sushi-ya has been creatively driving acquisition and usage with various point-of-sale materials like table-top standees with a QR code to access the web application.