The Institute for Information Industry conducted a survey of consumer satisfaction focused on Taiwan’s top 100 service-industry brands, announcing the top 10 “IT innovators” in May. Of those 10, five were from the restaurant industry, beating out both the electronics and banking sectors, and Wow­prime was a particular standout, with four of their brands settling into the top 10. Compared with last year’s inaugural survey, in which only two of their brands ranked, it seems clear that their brand power is on the rise.

Wow­prime started out with the Wang Steak restaurant business in 1993. Since 2000, they've undergone rapid diversification, and now they have some 11 brands under their roof. In addition to Wang Steak, Wow­prime’s Tasty steak restaurant chain, Yuan­shao ya­ki­niku, and To­kiya Japanese cuisine also made this year’s list.

The restaurant industry has traditionally been seen as one of the more resistant to change of the service industries, and also as one in which the level of sophistication of the service provided is among the lowest. With Wow­prime taking the lead in terms of technological innovation, though, it is shaking off that stigma. But how did they do it?

Pull out your smartphone and show the QR code of your discount voucher and you’ll get a discount on your meal. This photo shows a branch of ­Takiya, one of Wowprime’s restaurant chains.

Strong customer relationship management is at the heart of how Wow­prime’s 11 brands operate. Building what they call a “stand-by-me” strategy, Wow­prime aim to keep their customers close through their brick-and-mortar operations and their virtual presence.

Deputy general manager of Wow­prime’s Brand Management Department Simon Kao wrote in his book Wow! Diversity as Prime Directive: “To get consumers to sign up as members on our brands’ websites, we have to ensure that every marketing activity points them to the relevant site and provides them with incentives to actually sign up.” For Wow­prime, the merging of online and offline is at the foundation of their customer relations strategy.

Wow­prime’s members directly create value for Wow­prime as a company. As Kao notes, creating strong relationships with members also creates lifelong loyal customers. At the bare minimum, the company needs to show that it cares about its members’ birthdays, wedding anniversaries, and other important days, as well as regularly communicating with its members to promote events both online and off.

The company began taking online signups in 2004, beginning online marketing the following year. Deputy manager of the Brand Management Department Chen Ya­ning points out that thus far, they’ve had some 4.8 million people sign up—or to put it another way, one in every five Taiwanese is a member of one of Wow­prime’s brands.

Chen also notes that these long-term, committed members accounted for some 7% of the group’s in-store revenues last year, so building good relationships with them ultimately has an impact on the company’s bottom line.

As the Internet has begun moving into Web 3.0 in the past few years, mobile apps have become an increasingly central part of how people communicate. As more and more people spend a good portion of their day focused on their mobile devices, the way members interact with companies is changing as well. Sensing the changing winds, Wow­prime quickly cottoned on to the fact that any attempt to build relationships with their members could no longer simply rely on their websites alone.

For example, members began commenting that fewer and fewer of them had printers at home to print out coupons. Wow­prime also began noticing that more and more members would come in with their coupons as photos on their smartphones rather than as hardcopy printouts. “The rise of the smartphone quickly necessitated a change in marketing methods,” remarks Chen.

 

In late 2011, Wow­prime caught the rising technology wave and released a new tool for communicating with their members: an iOS app.

“It just provided information on branch locations,” says Chen. “But even so it did pretty well. Nevertheless, we always felt like it was missing something. It was like the app and the website were two separate platforms with no linkage between them in terms of communicating with members.”

And if it wasn’t going to create any benefits in terms of dialog with their members, and thus also in terms of boosting customer loyalty, then for all the novelty of the technology, the app would be all but useless to Wow­prime as a marketing tool.

With this in mind, last September Wow­prime launched updated versions of their app on Android and iOS devices, covering all 11 of their brands. Then, in April this year, they further refined the apps with a full membership system, finally taking a step toward bringing together members new and old and integrating their virtual and real world presences.

Branding the apps as “Fun Cuisine” rather than with the Wow­prime name specifically was a deliberate part of their brand diversity strategy. By not lumping all the brands together under the group’s name, the impression of each brand as an independent entity is strengthened, helping each independently strive toward being a leader in its own particular niche.

“When figuring out how to name and position the apps, we took into consideration our users’ search habits, and by positioning it as a more general ‘cuisine’ app, we expect to be able to draw in customers beyond just those already loyal to our brands,” says Chen. Since going live late last year, the apps have already accumulated around 400,000 downloads, and customers using the special offers posted through the apps have spent some NT$16 million with the group’s restaurants each month—approximately 2% of the group’s total monthly revenues.

And since April, users have been able to connect the apps with their Facebook accounts and enjoy further special offers.

Wow­prime is actively encouraging its website members to download their app, as well as encouraging app users who are still not members to sign up. Full membership, tied in with Facebook, means more special offers than the apps provide to non-members, Chen explains, and as a result, the company expects the number of website members to grow too.

The combination of cuisine and app technology has led to Wowprime’s members sticking closer to the company, opening up a new world of technological innovation for the service industry.

Yang Renda, head of the Institute for Information Industry’s Innovative DigiTech-Enabled Applications & Services (IDEAS) Institute, notes that a user’s experience with a company or brand through technology provides invaluable feedback on the quality of the service being offered. If they don’t feel like the interaction is smooth and easy, then it doesn’t matter how much more the company pours into the technological side of things; to the users, it’s meaningless.

In other words, what counts in terms of how service enterprises employ novel technologies isn’t the prowess or power of the technology itself, but how well the interface with that technology serves the user.

Wowprime’s strategy of strengthening its ties with its members by the use of apps has greatly increased the value of members to the company with minimal cost, thanks to providing technology that is user friendly. It is this user-friendliness that is key to how Wow­prime has successfully integrated the strength of its brands with the power of new technology.

The combination of cuisine and app technology has led to Wowprime’s members sticking closer to the company, opening up a new world of technological innovation for the service industry.