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Gusto Italian Restaurants

gusto italian platinum club rewards case study

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A new customer rewards tier for Gusto Italian Restaurants.

We worked with Gusto Italian on a new rewards tier for Gusto Italian Restaurants, creating a unique member experience and a new revenue stream for the business. As the long-term website development and paid media supplier for Gusto Italian, we were really excited that they wanted to bolster their rewards scheme, and that they wanted us to plan and build the platform extension with them.

the brief.

Add a new tier to the existing Gold club loyalty programme platform to allow customers to upgrade to Platinum Club, using subscription payments.

The Platinum Club rewards system is a hospitality-industry leading loyalty model, that allows customers to pay a nominal monthly or annual fee to allow them access to exciting benefits, including 40% off food Sunday to Thursday in all neighbourhood restaurants.

Gusto Italian approached us to help them design, build and implement their new rewards programme end-to-end. This included initial brainstorming and architecture concepting, involving the in-venue customer experience, external 3rd party data suppliers (eg. Zonal loyalty platform), staff training, and of course the online experience for the customer when signing up and performing actions on their rewards account.

Also required was an integration with an online payment processing system. As this is something Gusto Italian have not required before, this required research, implementation and staff training separately to the above.

We were required to have this designed, built, implemented, tested and ready to launch within 12 weeks.

challenges

Short time frame with many external stakeholders

Loyalty platforms, payment providers, in-venue staff

Secure payment processing

Set up and implementation of Stripe, including training

Streamlined user experience, with multiple tiers

Addition of a second membership tier with clear interface

solutions.

Sitting down with key stakeholders and discussing requirements is always the first step with a project like this. Gusto Italian trusted us to advise on all aspects of delivery to make sure everything could fit together and work efficiently, whilst meeting the tight deadlines.

After agreeing our approach and outlining how we wanted things to work, we got started setting up the nuts and bolts of the architecture, and a quick test framework, and once we had a solid proof of concept, we showcased it and explained it to Gusto Italian’s key technology partners such as Zonal. This allowed us the confidence to instruct the partners to start with their own integration pieces, whilst we built out the customer-facing integration.

our approach

We selected Stripe as the payment gateway, given our previous experience with their platform, and their reliability and developer-friendliness. This integration is the cornerstone of the Platinum Club platform, handling not only the card processing system, but also the payment pages, account management system, subscriptions, products, pricing, automated emails and more. This covers a lot of the complexity of the system, and gives us peace of mind that the important security and data privacy features are in good hands.

Once Stripe was set up and configured correctly, we needed a custom middleware platform to allow our existing frontend stack to communicate securely with Stripe, primarily to check if any given customer had a valid Platinum Club subscription or not. The middleware is also used to track new Stripe payments and subscription cancellations, and relay this information to the other technology partners automatically. We utilised Cloudflare’s cutting-edge technology to build out the middleware; harnessing D1 for data storage, and Workers for the middleware logic, using the Hono framework. We love Cloudflare’s stack as it’s reliable, fast and cheap!

The final piece of the puzzle could seem like the most important – the customer experience in the webapp. We bolstered the existing Gold club loyalty programme platform with features to allow customers to upgrade from Gold to Platinum Club, or to sign up as Platinum Club from cold. Once logged in, customers are shown a different colour scheme and branding, depending on which membership tier they are part of. There is also an account management area for Platinum Club subscribers, where they can change payment details, and perform other account related actions.

results.

We saw staggering adoption of the new membership tier almost immediately – thanks to their email marketing campaigns, in-venue signage, on-website messaging, our paid media exposure, and of course the generous launch offer (free prosecco anyone?!).

This resulted in Gusto Italian getting a 100% ROI on their development costs within one week, engaging customers new and old, and they now continue to grow their subscriber user base day after day. This brings a healthy additional revenue stream into the business, and positions Gusto Italian as a forward-thinking digital brand with a loyal and engaged digital customer base.

It was essential to us that in introducing this new loyalty model to our guests, we were able to provide a seamless journey that was integrated with our existing platform. Working with the team at Flaunt we were able to map out the process from our guests’ perspective from the very beginning, prioritising their user experience. Jamie and the team at Flaunt supported us along the way, and successfully worked to the quick development timescale we needed from them.

Zoe Sarratt - Digital Marketing Manager, Gusto Italian Restaurants

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