TouchBistro bridges the customer journey across departments and channels with Salesforce

When a customer enters a restaurant powered by TouchBistro’s technology, they can expect a seamless experience. From placing an order to paying the bill, it’s all digitized and connected.

This approach doesn’t just result in a better customer experience, but also more efficient employees. Servers can focus on their customers. Chefs can focus on the food. And managers can focus on creating an amazing overall dining experience.

TouchBistro applies the same principles to its business. With the Salesforce ecosystem, it’s digitized and automated processes from nurturing prospects and winning deals to onboarding customers and providing support services. “With Salesforce, we have a 360-degree view of our customers, which means we can work with them effectively at every stage of their journey – through good and bad times,” said Andre Proulx, Director of Marketing Operations at TouchBistro. 

More than 25,000 restaurants worldwide have been powered by TouchBistro technology. One of the fastest-growing tech companies in Toronto, it has expanded into the US, the UK, and Mexico. With the restrictions resulting from COVID-19 leaving many restaurants struggling, TouchBistro’s integrated front-of-house and back-of-house technologies are key to helping these venues adapt. “Without flawless online booking and track and trace capabilities, restaurants won’t survive,” confirmed Proulx. “We deal with the technology side so our customers can focus on what’s important to them.”

With a pre-pandemic expansion goal of up to 100% year-on-year, TouchBistro needs to ensure it can continue to support its customers as it scales. But with fragmented systems and every team using different technology, the company was unable to gain holistic insights into its customers and its business. “COVID-19 aside, we’re a high growth company and we need to make internal processes as efficient as possible today, so they’ll scale up tomorrow,” explained Proulx.

To maximize sales efficiency, TouchBistro has been using Sales Cloud since 2011, shortly after it was founded. In 2018, the company started to realize a more connected vision, with the implementation of Service Cloud, and in 2020 it added Marketing Cloud to provide the full 360-degree customer view.

“Every customer-facing employee in the business captures data in Salesforce,” affirmed Brian Mehlenbacher, Director of Business Operations at TouchBistro. “With the entire customer journey tracked in one place, we can collaborate seamlessly across departments to improve the customer experience and gain holistic insights that support good decision-making.”

As the first to benefit from a more coherent approach, sales teams at TouchBistro have been able to boost momentum. With Sales Cloud, they can track prospects through the pipeline, segment leads, and report in real time to fuel continuous improvement. Most importantly though, sales reps can step away from data entry and focus on helping their customers succeed. “Customers trust us more because we’re better informed, which enhances conversion rates,” said Mehlenbacher. “We also have greater visibility of how our sales reps are doing, so we can develop training sessions around real data to help them achieve their full potential.”

Sales Cloud is augmented by Salesforce Inbox, which provides sales teams with email templates for common queries, and Salesforce Maps, which helps them strategically plan travel itineraries for meetings. Integration with a coaching and training solution from the Salesforce AppExchange has also helped with boost team performance, resulting in a 3–4% increase in deal size. 

Once a customer is signed up, it’s a seamless transition to post-sales as service teams can view all relevant data about their customers via Service Cloud. Easy access to customer information underpins the team’s ability to provide stand-out service, as Michael McFarlane, Manager of Customer Success Optimization at TouchBistro, explained, “Our service agents can now focus on listening and responding to the customer, as they no longer have to expend time and effort searching through multiple systems looking for data.”

This also increases efficiency, as demonstrated by the company’s service performance. Since integrating Service Cloud with other applications from the Salesforce AppExchange, the company has seen an 18% reduction in call handle time, with each team dealing with 10% more cases.

Service Cloud provides useful information around employee performance as well, so managers can help them succeed. “I’m a big believer in happy employees resulting in happy customers,” said McFarlane. “With Salesforce, we have insights into how our agents perform best, and can place them in the situations where they can excel.”

Following its success in sales and service, TouchBistro recognized that it could achieve even more by bringing marketing into the fold. The company now uses Marketing Cloud for managing emails, social interactions, and advertising. “Restaurant owners are very busy people. With Marketing Cloud, we can deliver consistent, relevant, and personalized communications across every channel,” said Proulx. “We’re now a journey-led, rather than channel-led team, which improves the customer experience.”

TouchBistro’s marketing team uses Social Studio to monitor all the main platforms, including LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. “With Social Studio, we have a better social presence and can respond faster to compliments and complaints,” commented Proulx. “It also helps us monitor the competition.”

With greater clarity around the customer journey, TouchBistro’s marketing team can see what’s working and what isn’t and make adjustments. For example, if a prospect never opens emails, the team can adapt its strategy and try social channels instead. “It’s one-to-one marketing, but on a massive scale,” explained Proulx. 

With this unified view of the customer across sales, service, and marketing, TouchBistro has been in a much better position to face the challenges created by COVID-19. For example, the company was able to effortlessly switch to working from home. And with the Lightning interface, it’s provided front line staff with the automated processes and information they need to instantly become competent customer care agents.

“With live data at our fingertips, we know what restaurants need before they do and can adapt on the fly,” affirmed Proulx. “We’ve been able to identify the regions and individual customers that need additional help and proactively support them.”

TouchBistro is hoping to get even more value from its data with the addition of Tableau, part of the Salesforce Customer 360 Analytics solution. With Tableau, the company will be able to perform enterprise-wide analytics across its sales, service, and marketing data.

“With Salesforce, the possibilities are endless, and we’re really excited to take the next steps,” said McFarlane. “We’ve already improved efficiency, gained greater business insights, and enabled cross-department collaboration. Salesforce is a game-changer for our business.”