Our CXO Series is a space for leaders across a variety of industries to discuss current challenges and share innovative solutions to drive customer success. Last week we had the exciting opportunity to hear from Ilana Brown, VP of Customer Success at SevenRooms.
SevenRooms is a hospitality platform designed to help operators maximize profits, build customer loyalty, and create truly exceptional guest experiences. As many of us know, COVID-19 has been especially hard on those in the hospitality industry. With shelter-in-place protocols and general safety concerns, restaurants have taken quite the hit. Cue SevenRoom’s game-changing solution – direct delivery.
Direct delivery eliminates the need for restaurants to pay high commission fees to other delivery platforms. It helps restaurants to increase per-order profitability while leveraging automation to help drive repeat orders and revenue. Take a look at what Ilana had to share about the experience of rolling this new capability out to the public.
Totango: You’ve done a lot to support the industry that you serve and created some options for them to survive during a really rough patch of time. From an employee perspective, has this been a positive experience?
Ilana Brown: Yes, for sure. I think the dedication that everyone has given to this has definitely proven to be out of passion. People who work at SevenRooms, if they didn’t love the hospitality industry before, they do now. You can’t possibly get yourself to work without that level of grit if you’re not passionate about helping something or helping a greater cause.
Totango: What has been the response from your customers with the rollout of direct delivery?
IB: Our client in Nashville, Urban Grub, was one of the first to launch, and within a couple of days, they were saving thousands of dollars. We showcased that Urban Grub saved three hundred dollars today, just today, and people were so inspired by that. They recognized that it actually was giving them the ability to help people keep their jobs and keep their doors open.
We’ve saved the restaurant industry millions of dollars at this point, in just over three months, which is insane. It feels really good.
Totango: We understand that SevenRooms, like many others, had to furlough employees. What was it like having to rollout direct delivery with a smaller team?
IB: Totango has been an absolute savior throughout all this. I truly, truly don’t know how we would have been able to mobilize as fast as we did with so few people. All the different things that we were able to build really, really fast because we had kind of unknowingly set ourselves up for success beforehand.
Totango: If you fast forward six months, what are some of the things you expect to see to help your business partners kind of accelerate out of this?
IB: I know just as much as anyone else does about what will actually happen in the next six months. But I think, the biggest thing with the direct delivery for many businesses is really around keeping your guests engaged. Over the next six months, if people start to forget about you and you do not keep them engaged in one way or another, you will be hard-pressed to get them back in six months’ time. So the ability to connect with your guests through delivery is important. There are other things that we are doing and building but there are so many pivots that a restaurant is going to have to make.
Restaurants are going to have to invest in more PPE. They’re going to have to invest in more training, more health investment technologies. They’re going to have a lower capacity for all their restaurants. They’re gonna have to figure out a way to make people want to keep coming back.
If you are interested in joining our CXO Series events, make sure to sign up to learn more. Looking to try out a customer success solution that allows you to pivot quickly and keep customers engaged, get started for free with Totango.
