Better serving EasyOrder customers, by automatically identifying their each needs.

Last week, we sat down with Laurent Vandevelde, CEO at EasyOrder. Laurent previously was responsible for the German market at Keyware Technologies (BE), after a brief 4-months-internship at Readz (US), and has quite some hands-on experience in scaling technology ventures. We asked him for his growth ambitions, his main challenges in achieving it, and his experience in being at the forefront of the product-led growth revolution. That is, implementing journy.io. 😉

Q: So, an easy start, what is EasyOrder?

EasyOrder provides food&beverage businesses their own branded app and direct ordering webpage. This allows end-users to order and pay ahead, enjoying a best-in-class user experience with benefits like app-only specials, loyalty stamps, promotions, coupons codes or exclusive announcements.

We started EasyOrder back in Jan 2020, right in the midst of the Corona pandemic. It was clear back then that the restaurant experience would change forever and that the F&B industry would need an easy-to-use yet flexible platform to accommodate that change.

Today, not even 2 years later, we are definitely proven right, seeing more than 50 trial requests coming in weekly.

Q: What are your growth ambitions?

To be the Nr 1 in the BeNeLux, in the segment of multi-channel deliveries. We see that this is where the market is going and where our platform offers most value. This is not some marketing bragging, this is a statement that goes throughout our entire company planning, up to our P&L.

You see, eventually, we know that only a few platforms will dominate the market, and if you’re not part of the top 3, there’s little chance you will survive.

Now, planning for this also reflects planning for revenue vs costs, especially vs customer acquisition costs.

Q: Is this your biggest challenge?

Well, sort of. Of course we need to constantly watch general cashflow and investment considerations, just as any startup does. But indeed, what keeps us awake at night is needing to provide the very best service for our customers, while keeping customer acquisition and retention costs as bearable as possible.

And this is where you guys come in, right? (Smiles) For us, journy.io delivers on a product-led growth promise that sales and customer success teams only need to focus on customers that will benefit from our interventions, rather then just giving a generic support to every single signup, not taking into account their usage of our platform.

If we would keep the latter strategy, we would need to 3x our sales and CS teams the coming year, which is simply not possible from a financial standpoint. Now, because we offer fewer assistance only to those in need, we substantially increase the quality of our support calls, without more people. This is clearly a win-win situation for both customer and EasyOrder.

Q: How did you experience working with journy.io?

At first, it took some time to realise what journy.io could do for us. Sure, we knew we could sync data from our platform to our CRM, and provide us in-CRM-tasks when a customer needed attention, based on how a user behaved on our platform... but we didn’t immediately see all the data benefits we could receive on top of that.

Where previously we had to invest development resources to code our dashboards, we now have our customer teams basically creating business-critical data on the fly, through simple point-and-click. The various scores we ‘magically’ get, allow us to see in our CRM what the state of our entire customer base is.

Q: Final conclusion in terms of benefits?

We previously held customer review meetings once every two weeks, typically on Monday morning. The whole customer team sat down on our conference table, studying platform usage, hoping to discover possible anomalies that would make us call a customer to remediate his/her problem. (We imagined customers calling us upon getting stuck, but that simply didn’t happen too often...and we would have customers leave the platform).

This 4-5 hours-10+-men-meeting is now gone. We get immediate notification, the moment journy.io identifies a problem, and our teams get detailed tasks in their CRM. From a customer perspective, they get pro-active semi-automated help, the moment they got stuck on our platform, or a call when problems persist. No more unsolicited phone calls asking for a meeting to ask how things are going....

And, finally, moving forward to offering a full self-serve onboarding one day, the product-led growth way, we feel that journy.io is the right partner to support such transition.