Bikky recently partnered with Nation’s Restaurant News and co-sponsors Square and SMG on NRN's June 2025 Market Leader Report, "Leveraging Loyalty to Drive Growth." The report surveyed over 450 operators nationwide on their approach to loyalty—including goals and KPIs, plans for future investment, and use of technology and AI in their guest engagement strategy.

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Another area of focus was guest data and its role in helping operators design, execute, and evaluate the performance of their loyalty programs. In this interview with Mark Brandau, Associate Director of Research & Insights at Informa, Bikky CEO Abhinav Kapur dives deep on how CDPs and loyalty providers can work together to help businesses drive sales, engagement and retention in today's environment.

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Read more from the conversation below, or check out the full report here.

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Operators tend to look at loyalty through a marketing lens and associate the customer experience with operations. But how should they think of both more holistically?

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We like to tell our clients that “marketing makes the promise, and operations keeps the promise.” From that standpoint, the two are inextricably linked. You need to think holistically about how you market, make, and serve your food, because those are the three key ingredients to the guest experience. 

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The best brands we work with understand that loyalty is just a tool in the broader marketing and operations toolkit. It’s a lever you can pull to enhance the guest experience. To put a finer point on it, when we talk to operators about how to drive adoption of their loyalty program, the single most successful tactic is asking your front-line team to ask the guest to sign up at the point of purchase. That’s the clearest example of how marketing and operations work together holistically. Marketing gets the guest in the door, operations delivers on the brand promise, and then tees up marketing to continue engaging that guest and drive repeat visits through the loyalty program.

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What else do consumers demand right now to get that sense of value? How can restaurants provide that, with help from technology?

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Value is not just price. Really, it’s food, service, and then the price paid for those things. Broadly, consumers have less discretionary spending money and are inflation-fatigued, so they’re shifting their spend. 

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My perception is that the rise of third-party delivery has made in-store value even more important. The definition is very different by occasion, whether I’m by myself and paying $30 to have a burrito delivered or going to a Mexican restaurant with two friends and spending $30 there, right? The check average is the same, but the notion of value is very different. This is why price alone can’t explain value. In one instance, I’m hungry now and I just want my food to eat by myself, while the other one is more experiential. 

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People are being more intentional about where they want to get their value from a restaurant. Over the last two to three years, you could see people doing both of those experiences, and now we’re getting into this mode where people choose to do one or the other. 

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Based on what we’ve seen in our data, traffic continues to be flat to down and new guest retention keeps declining. That means it’s more important than ever to hold onto your loyal guests. That’s where technology, like a CDP or loyalty program, can really help a brand shine. By segmenting your guests based on their frequency, daypart, preferred menu item, or location we’ve seen some of our partners increase their marketing conversion rates by 3x to 4x. By understanding who your most loyal guests are, what they like, and how they behave, brands are able to consistently deliver value.

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How can restaurants begin to know what kind of experience their guests want, what they value, and when?

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The place to start is by talking to your guests. From there, I would anonymously shop your brand across every touchpoint: in-store without your app, in-store via your app, through first-party ordering, and third-party delivery. From there you will see exactly what your guests see when they visit your brand — and all the areas that could be improved. Does your packaging reflect your price point? How fast or convenient is the service in-store? Did any technology — like kiosks, for example — impact your experience in an unexpected way? 

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By viewing your brand through your guests’ eyes, you’ll get a clear picture of how they perceive your brand, across service, quality, experience, and price. From there, data can help you validate the hunches you’ve collected from those experiences. That’s where I feel like a CDP really works best. It complements the value prop of the loyalty program by providing a more holistic view of how your guests behave with your brand, so when you come with questions about your business, you can see whether or not the data backs up your hunches.

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What goals should brands have for their most loyal guests? What behaviors should they focus on driving?

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The most important thing a brand can do is fight for the next visit. At the end of the day, all you want is for a guest to come back again, whether it’s their second visit or twentieth. For example, we know that average check typically goes down when a guest opts into the loyalty program, but this is more than offset by the increase in frequency. In general, we’ve seen that loyalty program guests have a 6x-8x higher lifetime value than a non-loyalty guest because of the habit they’ve built with the brand. 

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On the other hand, across the industry, we see that 80% of guests never come back after the first visit. There’s so much competition in the space right now, so even if the guest doesn’t have a bad experience, there’s always another option if their expectations aren’t fully met on that first visit. We often tell the marketers we work with to focus on three key aspects of the guest journey: getting them from their first visit to their second, reducing the number of days between visits, and making sure you have a strong lapsed guest recovery program in place.

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These are the three areas where marketers can have the biggest impact on the guest journey, both within and outside of their loyalty program. For that reason, it’s important to know the days, dayparts, channels, menu items, and offers that give you the best chance of successfully impacting those three areas. Measuring all of this of course becomes a lot easier with the right CDP and loyalty partners.

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Outside of the three metrics you just shared, what KPIs should operators focus on when they’re validating their strategies?

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Of course, sales is the ultimate barometer, but if I were starting from scratch, the basic KPIs I would focus on are: guest counts for both new and repeat guests, retention rate, frequency, and average check.

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The most sophisticated brands we work with take it a step further. For example, they report on sales attributable to loyalty and to marketing offers, tracking how much a guest spends 30, 60, or 90 days after they use an offer, which I think is the true measure of success for any offer. It’s not just about how many conversions they had or how much revenue resulted from an offer, but what is the incrementality of this offer? Did somebody come back after they took this action?

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