me&u scales quickly as hospitality venues embrace a new way of working

Australian start-up me&u wants to build a brighter future for the hospitality industry. This future is one with thriving venues and happy customers who are able to spend less time in the queue and more time around a table with family and friends.

me&u’s main offering is an app-less platform that allows customers to order, pay, and split the bill, all on their own and from the convenience of their table. The platform also delivers much needed efficiency to the hospitality industry.

“As our business evolves, we’re solving more problems for the industry so that venues can become more profitable and provide a better experience,” said Asheesh Chacko, Chief Operating Officer, me&u. “Instead of taking orders from behind the bar, for example, staff can spend more time on the floor engaging with customers.”

Another benefit of me&u’s platform is that it allows venues to curate their menu in a way that promotes food pairings and recommended beverages. This complements the dining experience while also helping venues to increase sales. The latter is key as venues seek to bounce back from the pandemic while operating in an industry with notoriously tight profit margins.

These benefits plus many more have driven rapid uptake of me&u, and the company has turned to Salesforce to efficiently scale and deliver its vision to transition the world to a smarter menu.

Starting out two years ago, me&u was confident in the opportunities ahead and for a good reason. In Australia alone, there are tens of thousands of hospitality venues and many face the challenges that me&u solves. me&u chose to use Salesforce to reach those venues in a targeted and efficient way.

“A lot of start-ups may choose a CRM that they think is cheap and cheerful, but they will often come back to Salesforce. We felt me&u was set to go places early on and decided to use Salesforce from the start,” said Chacko.

Sales Cloud has helped me&u set its sales team up for success. The company has established targeted lists of venues such as pubs, bars, and breweries and can assign these venues to sales reps and track the progress of deals. This visibility is important for sales managers as it helps them to manage performance and support remote teams.

me&u also manages the contract process using Salesforce and Conga Sign from the AppExchange, so when new venues are ready to sign, the process is easy and completely paperless.

In just two years, me&u has signed 300 groups and rolled out its services to over 500 active venues. This includes a 3x growth in customers and 30x growth in transactions during the pandemic.

In the past, onboarding these customers was a challenge. The process took up to four weeks and required four or five employees to carry out activities such as photography, menu design, and training. This was in addition to managing the technical integration with the venue’s Point-of-Sale (POS).

“We have 15 steps we need to go through to get venues live and it is very complex as a lot of the steps need to happen side-by-side. Salesforce has given us a central place to manage all of this and enabled us to redesign the process for a huge improvement in efficiency. Onboarding has been reduced from four to two weeks and we can handle double the number of activations,” said Chacko.

Scaling support is a common challenge for growing businesses and, for me&u, this problem is compounded by the fact that its customers are busiest when most of its staff are at home or asleep. The company needed a way to support a growing number of customers while maintaining a small support team at night.

Service Cloud together with a new omnichannel strategy is set to solve me&u’s support challenges. Specifically, the company plans to leverage Salesforce Knowledge and Chat with Einstein Bots to provide customers with the answers they need automatically. It will also be able to draw on its 360 degree view of the customer to provide more consistent and personalised support.

“The digital engagement and automation enabled by Salesforce means that we don’t need to invest in a large support team to provide a great experience to our customers,” said Chacko. “Chat is also a very practical way to provide support when people are visiting or working at a venue.”

me&u has already improved efficiency by using Service Cloud to automate responses to customer surveys. The company has traditionally raised support cases if a customer submits a review rating without a comment. Then, in the past, me&u would manually send an email to learn more.

Now, however, if a customer submits a rating of 5/5 that case is closed automatically. This has resulted in 40% of all cases resolved on their own.

me&u is working with Salesforce consulting partner Fluent Group to extend its use of Salesforce. It wants to build on the benefits achieved to date and deliver on its vision of a smarter menu. Data is pivotal to me&u’s strategy as it helps the company and its venue customers to understand consumer behaviour.

For example, by analysing transaction data, me&u can provide recommendations on how venues can better structure their menus to drive a more profitable business. In the future, me&u also plan to personalise menus based on the preferences of each individual.

me&u uses Snowflake to analyse this data and it has connected Snowflake to Tableau to streamline the creation of dashboards which it uses to understand and share data with customers. In fact, monthly dashboards can be refreshed in just one click.

“A large part of our strategy is about making the menu smarter. Tableau will help us by unlocking the data we need and ultimately allow us to deliver more value to the hospitality industry,” said Chacko.