Anthony’s Coal Fired Pizza uses Adentro to treat customers like family

Anthony Bruno will tell you, “the best New York pizza comes from Florida.” A New York native, Anthony began making his own pizza because he couldn’t find a decent slice in the South. It’s become a popular recipe. Starting from a single location in 2002, there are now more than 60 Anthony’s Coal Fired Pizza restaurants in eight states.

The Challenge

Anthony’s everybody-is-family approach has been built on authentic ingredients and food as well as personal relationships. The goal was to know every customer and make them feel special and at home. But as the business grew, maintaining this level of hospitality became quite a challenge.

As dozens of locations were added, Anthony’s worried they would lose the personal touch they were known for. To stay connected with customers at scale they would have to modernize their technology. No single solution reached 100% of customers, so they needed options that paired well together. 

Anthony’s began working with Adentro in 2016 and Paytronix shortly thereafter. The goal for Adentro was to use the free guest WiFi in each location to know every guest, communicate with them more personally, and recognize them when they visited a store. Paytronix, a guest loyalty platform, was put in place to reward customers, making them feel special, welcomed and appreciated.

The two platforms paired perfectly. Adentro was an effective way to get to know new customers, collect their contact information and personalize communication. Paytronix was valuable in rewarding them for visits, increasing loyalty and understanding their preferences. But getting the most from the combination required a manual process that took hours of work each month. Contact details and visit behavior collected in Adentro had to be downloaded and then uploaded into Paytronix to drive their loyalty program.

Once a month, Skip Kimpel, Anthony’s head of IT, would get up a 4am to run the process of extracting data from one system and put it in the other and make sure it was done before start of business at 9am. It required him to download a data file, load it into a SQL database, run a custom script to de-duplicate addresses and then upload the cleaned file.

“Our goal is to know 100% of our guests and treat them like family. Combining Adentro and Paytronix is the best way we’ve found so far.”

Skip Kimpel, VP Information Technology, Anthony’s Coal Fired Pizza

The Solution

It’s not hard to see why Skip would want to automate the process. Marketing and IT staff are lean at Anthony’s, and have better things to do than manage manual data processes. Skip wanted to streamline data flows and remove manual intervention in order to make everything easier, and provide guests with more timely communication. 

Integrating data flows between Adentro and Paytronix would make both platforms more valuable, and save lots of time. Customer contact information and visit behavior collected through Adentro would personalize communication and flow automatically to Paytronix where it would be used to reward customers for their visits. 

By using WiFi to connect with new guests and track visits, participation in Anthony’s rewards program would grow at a much faster clip and provide a single source of truth for guest information.

The Results

Today, Anthony’s collects 7,000+ emails every month with a database that surpassed 150,000 in under a year. And with Adentro’s ability to combine contact information with each customer’s visit history, Anthony’s can automatically use email to welcome new customers and encourage visits. For example, they use a lost customer email re-engage with customers who haven’t visited in a while. During the first year of use, the Adentro program brought back more than 1,800 lapsed customers.

By integrating Adentro with their Paytronix customer loyalty program and removing friction from the sign-up process, Anthony’s Coal Fired Club Rewards program is growing much more quickly. The number of customers invited to join has more than doubled. By combining timely and relevant communication with a rewards program, Anthony’s is getting better performance, and value, from both its Adentro and Paytronix solutions. 

Anthony’s knows more customers now, and treats them like family!