Case Study
Making more diners your diners.
Hawksmoor Group savours sweet success when Distil’s data experts unlock their OpenTable data so teams can delight customers, reward loyalty and save time.
1,000
New CRM contacts identified every week
24%
Increase in CRM visibility
of identifiable customers
35%
Full-time employee
time saving
From invisible to seen – a journey of getting to know customers
Can you tell one of your best customers from a new diner visiting for the first time just by their reservation? Or perhaps recognise a booking from someone who dines regularly at another venue in your group?
The leadership team at Hawksmoor had ambitions to cultivate their loyal diner base and create an even more rewarding brand experience for Hawksmoor regulars. Between platforms that wouldn’t communicate, data silos in each restaurant ID in OpenTable, and the time spent manually drawing data sets together – they didn’t have a solution to make it a reality.
The answer lay in their data. The challenge was to find a way to create a powerful customer data source upon which the team could build a series of customer loyalty initiatives, safe in the knowledge the data was accurate. That’s where Distil comes in.
Hawksmoor Brand Vitals
Will Beckett and Huw Gott were childhood friends turned committed foodies who were in pursuit of the best beef around. When they discovered it was all about traditional British breeds reared well, they decided to create London’s best steak restaurant.
They knew they wanted to be different, right from the early days in their first London location. Not because it was trendy, but because it was the right thing to do. The Hawksmoor brand mantra, “creating something special” remains at the heart of their teams throughout their global network of 12 restaurants in 6 cities and 3 countries.
Whether it’s creating a working culture that’s recognised as one of the UK’s best places to work 11 years in a row or donating over £2M to charity, they’ve made a name for themselves in sustainable restaurant practices. Not least of which, was achieving the prestigious certified B Corp status.
Challenge #1 – Unlock customer data in OpenTable
The marketing, guest services and operations teams were limited by the silos of booking and diner data in OpenTable at the restaurant ID level (RID), with no way of joining up a customer’s dining habits or marketing engagements across locations.
So, the Distil data experts unlocked booking and diner data silos by connecting data from all 14 restaurant IDs in OpenTable and bringing it into one single customer data source.
There were understandably gaps in the data – sometimes the person who books doesn’t attend, sometimes reservations are taken over the phone with minimal or misspelt data. Using Distil’s proprietary AI-driven Identity Resolution engine, customer records were combined and resolved using a series of common markers to create a constantly updated, live customer data source.
Booking and diner data is now automatically flowed out of OpenTable – it’s organised, enriched and sent back into OpenTable and Dotdigital – where the marketing and venue teams can maximise its value to create the perfect customer journey.
The single customer view now accurately reflects a diner’s relationship with the brand across all restaurants and marketing channels and has created the foundation for all regular customer loyalty initiatives.
The key to driving value for Hawksmoor was integrating their OpenTable, Dotdigital, Aloha and other data sources to create one source of customer data truth. We’ve been able to unlock insights around diner habits, demand and loyalty already – and that’s just the start!
Gerry McNicol, Founder and CEO, Distil.ai
Challenge #2 – Get ready to surprise and delight customers
Customers love a personal experience, it makes them feel recognised and rewarded for their brand loyalty. But meaningful personalisation relies on live, accurate customer data.
A diner could have a long-standing relationship with your brand having eaten there multiple times, but if they never book – you might never know their name. Prior to working with Distil, a regular customer at Hawksmoor’s Knightsbridge restaurant wouldn’t be known as anything other than a new customer when on business with clients eating at their Dublin location. Their customer data would be fragmented across both locations in OpenTable, leaving an incomplete picture of this client’s relationship with the brand.
Using the new single source of customer data, Distil solved the challenge of understanding regular customers across different restaurant locations and rewarding brand loyalty at every opportunity.
Live customer insights are delivered directly into OpenTable, so not only do the guest services managers and hosts now have much better visibility of their diners they can now see at a glance who is a deserving recipient of any special gifts and experiences.
This visibility has also opened up advanced segmentation to the marketing team, who can now build specific recipient lists for their CRM and email marketing campaigns based on a diner’s loyalty status.
In the past, it’s been difficult to tie a specific marketing activity back to the results seen in OpenTable, but now the teams can see exactly how a specific segment is responding to a particular incentive.
In the future, Distil will bring more data sources into the Hawksmoor single customer view, which will further enrich and enlighten the customer records. Sources such as email engagement and website activity will soon add another layer of insight for the Hawksmoor team to further their personalisation efforts.
We are doing something unprecedented and super innovative in the restaurant industry with Distil – we are all very excited and impressed.
Will Beckett, CEO and Co-Founder at Hawksmoor
Challenge #3 – Recognise and reward loyal diners
Regular diners come in lots of different forms. Someone who identifies as a regular may come only once a year on their anniversary and they never go anywhere else. Others may visit once a week with their colleagues on a Friday night after work to unwind after a busy week.
Understanding customer loyalty in all its forms is key to building repeat customer revenue and lifetime value – something the Hawksmoor team was looking at through multiple lenses with limited success since 2018. The team had tried customer surveys and in-venue feedback collection, but always found the responses incomplete or unreliable.
The Distil data team were able to put the data from OpenTable to work and create a detailed view of regular diners. Identifying different loyalty patterns, the team were able to clearly segment regular diners into 6 different brackets by frequency of visit – 5 years, 3 years, annual, twice a year, monthly and weekly segments.
Through the Distil analytics platform, the Hawksmoor team now have a clear picture of customer loyalty, overlaid with spend by segment. The AI predictive engine shows teams which guests the team are expecting to see based on their loyalty pattern, and who is at risk of churn because they’ve not paid a visit in their usual time frame.
Distil’s customer data platform offers individual segments based on loyalty status such as on track for their next visit, due a visit, overdue or lapsed, plus manual segments based on last visit elapsed time. The marketing team can now enact any number of touchpoints to drive return visits, with full visibility of the success of their campaigns.
Top takeaways
Recognising and rewarding loyalty is always a worthwhile strategic approach. After all, a brand can positively impact customer lifetime value, improve customer satisfaction and boost that all-important bottom-line revenue figure. And the best part – creating more enjoyment, growing love for a brand and reaping the rewards are all ambitions that can be built on good data.
The Hawksmoor team knew their data held the key to their next stage of growth, and partnering with Distil has opened up that potential, creating new opportunities for marketing, venue and operations teams to test new ways to use it for growth.
Everything your brand needs to create a personal experience that’s just right for every indivdiual diner is in your OpenTable data – and Distil can help you unlock it.
Ready to delight your customers?
If your customer data is more cluttered kitchen that precision operation, Distil can help. Whether it’s data to power accurate marketing personalisation or launching your own loyalty programme, it all begins with the data.
