SevenRooms serves up personalized hospitality, food, and beverage services with Google Cloud
Kinesh Patel
CTO and Co-founder of SevenRooms
Finding ways to increase customer loyalty and profitability in a post-COVID world is top of mind for hotels, bars, and restaurants. Unfortunately, many food and beverage services providers struggle to deliver the personalized experiences that keep guests coming back for more. The reality is that most traditional hospitality apps offer only limited insight into guest activities, preferences, underlying operating costs, and other essential details.
We built SevenRooms to help food and beverage operators create truly memorable experiences by managing and personalizing every step of the guest journey. With SevenRooms, restaurants in more than 250 cities globally leverage technology and data to provide unforgettable hospitality experiences with a human touch. That includes seating guests at their favorite table, pouring complimentary glasses of wine from a preferred vintage, offering special menu options, and personalized experiences for special occasions.
Scaling guest experience and retention on Google Cloud
When developing SevenRooms, we needed a technology partner that would enable our small team to securely scale services, automate manual tasks, and accelerate time to market while reducing IT costs. That’s why we started working with Google App Engine—and later became more involved with the Google for Startups Cloud Program.
We soon realized many traditional apps lacked the integrations and capabilities needed to respond to the unique challenges facing food and beverage operators that the Google for Startups Cloud Program services provide. With guidance from experts on the Google Startups Success team, we quickly transformed SevenRooms from a beta restaurant and nightclub reservation and guest management point solution into a full-fledged guest experience and retention platform that analyzes actionable data to automatically build and continuously update detailed guest profiles.
The combination of Google App Engine and other Google Cloud solutions makes everything easier to build and scale. We’re seeing our total cost of ownership (TCO) decline by 10-15%, so we can shift additional resources to R&D to help customers create one-of-a-kind interactions with their guests. And importantly, we can bring new products to market 200-300% faster than competitors.
Because SevenRooms handles a lot of sensitive guest data, stringent security protocols are vital. We store all data on Google Cloud, taking advantage of its highly secure-by-design infrastructure and built-in support for international data privacy laws such as GDPR. We use BigQuery and Looker for data analysis and reporting, and power our NoSQL database with Firestore. We also scale workloads and run Elasticsearch on Google Compute Engine (GCE)—and seamlessly integrate our reservation booking engine with Google Maps and Google Search.
In the future, we’re looking to further market actionable guest data with the help of advanced machine learning (ML) models with TensorFlow and Google Cloud Tensor Processing Units (TPUs). Cloud TPUs and Google Cloud data and analytics services are fully integrated with other Google Cloud offerings, including Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). By running ML workloads on Cloud TPUs, SevenRooms will benefit from Google Cloud’s leading networking and data analytics technologies such as BigQuery.
We’re also exploring additional Google Cloud solutions such as Anthos to unify the management of infrastructure and applications across on-premises, edge, and multiple public clouds, as well as Google Cloud Run to deploy scalable containerized applications on a fully managed serverless platform. These solutions will enable us to continue to quickly expand our services and offer customers a variety of new benefits.
Building a profitable, sustainable future in food and beverage
Our work with the Google Startups Success team has been instrumental to helping us get where we are today. Their responsiveness is incredible and stands out compared to services from other technology providers. Google Cloud gives us a highly secure infrastructure and next-level training to evolve our infrastructure using solutions such as BigQuery and Backup and Disaster Recovery.
We also work with Google Cloud partner, DoiT International, to further scale and optimize our operations. In particular, DoiT provided expert scripts to short-cut lengthy processes, while actively troubleshooting any issues or questions that came up. DoiT continues to share guidance in key areas for future products and features. They have provided expertise for architecture, infrastructure and cost management. Moving forward, we're excited to work with Google Cloud and DoiT to handle a growing surge in users which we anticipate in 2023 and beyond.
With Google Cloud, SevenRooms is revitalizing food and beverage service delivery by enabling businesses to cultivate and maintain direct guest relationships, deliver exceptional experiences, and encourage repeat visits. We’ve compiled many case studies that demonstrate how our customers see great results by personalizing their interactions with guests, from $1.5M in cost savings, to $400K of additional revenue, to a 68% jump in email open rates.
Demand for our guest experience and retention platform keeps growing as we help our customers take a people-first approach by delivering unique and tailored dining experiences. We can’t wait to see what we accomplish next as we expand our team and reach new markets worldwide.
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