Industry Innovator: Wisely

Sparkfly’s platform was designed to integrate seamlessly with a variety of partners so that we can create a completely customized marketing experience for our customers and a state-of-the-art experience for their customers. They deserve every cutting-edge innovation we can give them, and Wisely certainly falls into that category. Read on to find out why they’re one of the Industry Innovators we’ve chosen to partner with.

THE COMPANY

Wisely was founded back in 2012, and in the years since, the company has made a huge impact on the restaurant industry. They focus solely on customer intelligence for restaurants—so much so that they built the first-ever customer data platform (CDP) specifically for restaurants. Their goal? To bridge the gap between customer data and the customer experience so that restaurants can maximize each customer’s lifetime value.

Speaking of value, there are plenty of big brands that see value in Wisely. Today, they work with a number of restaurants that you’ve undoubtedly heard of—including P.F. Chang’s, Chuy’s, First Watch, and Lazy Dog. In fact, their client list spans roughly 5,000 restaurants across the U.S. and Canada.

THEIR INNOVATION

Wisely’s platform is an all-in-one CRM and CDP that can handle reservations, waitlists, table and order management, marketing automation, and guest sentiment. They’ve even got data science-backed machine learning and artificial intelligence for campaigns. As a result, they can gather all kinds of data about every single customer, not just the ones in loyalty programs. This is a huge step forward because the typical points-based program only brings in data for 20-30% of a restaurant’s customers (if you’re lucky). With Wisely’s data capabilities, you can bring everything you know about each customer to every interaction, which gives you the power to create highly personalized campaigns.

Part of that personalization includes being able to reach customers in a way that works for them, from triggered emails and SMS messages, to social media ads, and more.

PARTNERSHIP POWER

Sparkfly and Wisely both believe that meaningful interactions make people feel valued and inherently loyal. As partners, our mission is to unify guest data and empower restaurants to create new ways to surprise and delight customers through personalized, uniquely tailored offers, rewards, and communications.

On Sparkfly’s end, we put dynamic single-use offer codes into automated welcome, win-back, retargeting, and incentive campaigns that are created on the Wisely platform. We can even generate offer codes for social and other digital ads in an effort to acquire customers who have not opted in to the restaurant’s 1:1 communications. Restaurants can also take data from Wisely’s CDP and have Sparkfly create special offers that can slide seamlessly into their customers’ digital wallets. 

Thanks to our real-time bi-directional integration, Sparkfly can handle all of the transactional services, customer acquisition, and overall offer management, while Wisely handles data aggregation that can be used to create personalized communications, like retargeting based on a specific customer’s activity (or lack thereof).

Our integration also closes the loop on all of the data that Sparkfly and Wisely take so seriously. Thanks to this partnership, restaurants can see the end-to-end journey that each customer takes—and then dig into deep analytics about each campaign, customer, and transaction so that they can optimize and get more from their marketing budget.

Together, we’ve worked with First Watch, Lazy Dog The Kitchen Restaurant Group, and Veggie Grill. For First Watch, our combined technology helped the marketing team leverage the power of offers and learn so much more about its customers. When First Watch wanted to capture preference data, we created $5 incentive offers to encourage customers to update their profile. First Watch broke its own records for opens and clicks with this campaign, and in just the first wave alone, 165,000 guest profiles got updated. Now, First Watch has the power to create a wide variety of targeted trigger campaigns that can help them win the share of stomach battle through more meaningful interactions.

LOOKING AHEAD

Sparkfly and Wisely give restaurants the power to collect detailed data, analyze it, and act on it accordingly—with far more precision than traditional out of the box loyalty providers. And unlike other technology, these tools were created specifically for restaurants, meaning they’re designed to meet all of the industry’s growing needs. In an era where customer expectations are getting higher and higher, you can’t ask for more than that!

Be sure to revisit our blog as we highlight more creative partners in our Industry Innovator series.