PAR Punchh vs. SessionM

We launched the program quickly and on schedule, Punchh has continued to evolve and enhance to adapt to our changing business needs, importantly developing integrations with other key partners —Olo, PAR Brink POS. I think it's ideal for a brand of our size with under 200 locations, perhaps for a chain of more than 2,000 locations, it could be worth considering building an in-house solution as a potential cost saving.

Incentivized

SessionM is ideal for enterprise restaurants, brands, and organizations to build and drive loyal behaviors via technology platforms. They've built their system via robust APIs integrations, but are now diving into a white label app system that allows smaller brands (100 units+) to utilize their incredible technology in their own brand, as opposed to just bigger players. They're the best at what they do.

Incentivized

• Reward-based App material. Punchh is great platform for reward tracking and fulfillment. I have not found one that does a better job at customer loyalty.

Incentivized

• Using data science to determine guest tendencies and actions: their system is incredibly smart and tracks historical actions to guess/estimate future actions, and creating programs to influence those actions.
• Integrated communication platforms to speak to all of our guests within various tactics—email, push notifications, text messages, in-app messages, etc.
• Loyalty management & CRM: creating and managing a program that runs consistently across the system.

Incentivized

• Look carefully into the integrations, find out exactly what is possible. We launched when we had Monkey Media as our online ordering tool, although it was integrated, we ended up having to move to Olo just because it was such a stronger integration.
• I would re-think having Facebook as an option to allow registration and signup to our app. This was recommended by Punchh, but we ended up getting so many out of date email addresses in our system that were associated with the Facebook account.
• One thing we wanted to launch with was a gift card integration, but due to Punchh not being PCI compliant, and due to other technological limitations, that's not something we've been able to bring into our loyalty app, which would be nice to have.

Incentivized

• Some improvement could be made on their integrations process with all platforms (olo, monkey media, etc.).

Incentivized

The customer success people are not as invested as it seems they should be in their clients' business, at least not for the amount of money the platform costs. I am always looking for best practices to be provided or at least discussed with my AM, and she doesn't ever seem to care about what others are doing in my industry.

Incentivized

We were looking for a partner who would help us get a loyalty program and a mobile app launched quickly, Punchh delivered our app on-time, the cost was very competitive and Punchh was being used by similarly sized brands in the restaurant industry. The integrations were in place and Punchh offered the Product functionality and performance we were looking for.

Incentivized

SessionM was light years ahead of Fishbowl, in the data science tendency assumptions that are built into the system, plus they don't offer an app for your brand to use. You'd have to employ a 3rd vendor to manage that. It's also important to note that SessionM sees ALL guests and POS content in the system, not just loyalty identified transactions.

Incentivized

• We brought in over $7M from the app use alone in Q1 & Q2 of 2019.
• It costs a ton to keep up, especially the more modules you subscribe to. Our (not so fancy price tier) price was about $100K for 2019.

Incentivized

• Our work with SessionM has been so incredibly impactful to our brand loyal guests, and the value they bring to our brand. For example, our loyal guests are worth $100+ more than our non-loyalty guests.

Incentivized