How Eatigo Boosted Reservations with the Clever.AI Recommendation Engine

In Southeast Asia, dining out has always been popular, from quick, daily meals to celebratory occasions. But with rising disposable incomes, consumers are developing more adventurous palates, driving a surge in demand for exciting new culinary experiences.

Full-service restaurants are stepping up with innovative, novel offerings. While the food service market is set for a robust CAGR of 12.65% up to 2029, full-service restaurants are keeping pace with a CAGR of 11.92% in value. To the consumer, this presents the dilemma of too much choice. How do they decide where to have their mid-week team dinner or weekend brunch? How quickly should they decide so the restaurant they want to go to has seats available and good deals?

Award-winning Eatigo is an online restaurant reservation platform that solves this problem. Set up in 2013, its model of offering time-based discounts of up to 50% every day at all its participating restaurants, from upscale hotels to popular food chains, has made it a top player. On a mission to “connect empty tables with empty stomachs”, it has expanded rapidly, seating over 6 million diners, and accumulated over 6000 restaurants across Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines.

Eatigo seeks powerful, unified customer engagement

With rival apps and even social media platforms vying to woo the diner, retention and reservation conversion have become more challenging. The prospective diner surfs multiple deals and often abandons journeys before going through with a reservation. Eatigo realized it had to quickly counter this behaviour. Regular personalization was no longer cutting it and advanced techniques like psychographics and machine learning needed to be brought in for more effective engagement.

As the Eatigo leadership scouted for solutions to build this comprehensive marketing engine, it found that most solutions did not offer the full set of required capabilities. However, CleverTap uniquely provided all-in-one capabilities for segmentation, orchestration, and analytics. What further set CleverTap apart was its powerful recommendation engine, which is a part of its AI/ML-powered capability suite: Clever.AI.

Harnessing Clever.AI to boost reservation conversions

There are a few different ways customers do not go through with their reservations. Let us look at how Eatigo leverages CleverTap’s AI-based recommendation engine to alter this.

• One, a customer makes a reservation but comes back to the app and cancels it. Here, the recommendation engine comes up with five other recommendations the customer may be interested in, increasing the chances of reservation conversion.
• Next, a customer may browse a restaurant but not go ahead and reserve. In this case, the engine quickly offers suggestions that are likely to be a good fit and convinces the customer to make a reservation.
• A 3rd and critical way in which CleverTap helps improve reservation conversion is by proactively preventing churn by reaching out to customers who made their last reservation 30 days ago. The recommendation engine engages them on multiple channels such as SMS, email, and push notifications with highly personalized restaurant choices based on their earlier preferences, hence increasing likelihood of the user returning to the app.

These suggestions are delivered to the customer real-time, or at predetermined timelines. How does the AI-driven recommendation engine come up with these hyper-personalized suggestions so quickly? Eatigo’s rich, well-classified restaurant catalog underpins the exercise, and immediate and historical behaviour is used. The conditions for selection are a combination of both contextual inputs, as well as the customer’s preferences. The result is highly personalized and targeted suggestions that significantly boost the likelihood of the prospective diner making a reservation.

Strategic use of CleverTap’s All-in-one capabilities 

In addition to the recommendation engine, Eatigo uses more of CleverTap’s features to create engaging user experiences. CleverTap’s Liquid tag feature helps Eatigo’s goal of hyper-personalization. The key variables customizing a message for a customer such as name, recently chosen cuisine, or favourite cuisines do not have to be hard-coded and are included with minimum effort to personalize messages. With easy to use templates, images of restaurants are also included within the message. This capability unlocks flexibility and efficiency for the Eatigo marketing team to design and deliver personalized messages rapidly at scale.

Eatigo also makes thorough use of CleverTap’s journey feature. To magnify the impact of the personalized recommendations, the company engages and holds diners’ attention with tailored, non-linear, omnichannel experiences orchestrated on CleverTap. In total, Eatigo has set up more than 10 automations and ~100 journeys on CleverTap to hyper-personalize its engagement.

Impact

To establish how effective this shift has been, Eatigo ran an experiment that measured the impact of AI recommendations on the next action of consumers. The results from the experiment showed that the use of the recommendation engine led to a clear & significant uptick in every market, with gains of more than 100%, i.e. a direct impact of 2X+ in the conversion rate. Customers who received a personalized recommendation were twice as likely to complete their reservation, compared to customers who did not get these recommendations.

In addition to this marketing automation which is deployed across regions, Eatigo teams use CleverTap for local campaigns. These campaigns are crafted with a strong local flavour, keeping in mind variables such as what people like to eat during certain festivals or sporting events. Multi-channel messaging and segmentation are leveraged to deliver the campaigns effectively in the towns and cities they are designed for.

Powering ahead with superior user experience

Eatigo’s success story demonstrates the power of AI-powered marketing automation. By leveraging CleverTap’s user segmentation, multi-channel, multilingual messaging, and AI-driven recommendation engine, Eatigo has effectively nurtured new users, increased the reservation conversion rate, and maximized customer lifetime value. As Eatigo continues to expand its reach, CleverTap’s platform will remain a key partner in its growth and user engagement strategies.