Introducing Thanx’s new Chief Data Officer

After more than a decade as Chief Product Officer (and cofounder) of Thanx I’m “moving on”, not from Thanx, but from Product. Starting today I’m leading a new function at Thanx as Chief Data Officer.

A new era of data for restaurants

When I joined my co-founders Zach Goldstein (Thanx’s CEO) and Darren Cheng (Thanx’s CTO) over a decade ago, the state of restaurant loyalty was a fairly poor status quo —?”buy one get one free” digital “Punchh” cards that had too much friction and so little value that it was nearly impossible to get customers to join, much less consistently participate. At the time Starbucks was far ahead of the game by using their reloadable digital stored value cards as the basis of their initial loyalty program, where having a card automatically earned you points. In 2010, roughly a decade after their introduction and right about the time Thanx got started, their reloadable cards managed to penetrate 20% of their payment volume. 20% was a stellar capture rate for restaurant loyalty programs when we founded Thanx. Today, 20% is still out of reach for many of our competitor’s customers as they haven’t done anything in the last decade to remove any of that friction. Meanwhile, programs on Thanx hit 20% in a few weeks.

The problem with a low capture rate is that it’s very challenging to understand your customers when the only ones you can measure are the ones who are already addicted to your product. For the other 80%, first time and casual buyers, they remain a mystery. Are you getting better at converting them into loyal customers? How do they respond when you raise prices? At Thanx, our leapfrog innovation was to take the next logical step and attach loyalty attribution to any payment card (not just merchant-issued gift cards as Starbucks had done) in order to scale data so our customers could answer those kinds of questions.

Today, Thanx is the only platform on the market that lets a consumer make their first purchase in their web browser or an app, attach loyalty to their credit card with a single click (over 90% of them choose to do so), and get loyalty value for all subsequent purchases, whether they be in a browser, an app, in-store or by phone, or even Apple Pay/Google Pay taps with their phone. Our “Loyalty 3.0” loyalty engine, marketing automation tools, and our integrated stored value product each helps brands who can’t afford to build it all from scratch like Starbucks did to achieve the same outcomes.

By and large we’ve achieved our initial goal. Restaurants on Thanx who transition from legacy providers often 3-5x their participation rate in a matter of months, capturing not just their most loyal customers but also their casual and true first-time diners as well.

When businesses can measure their relationship with more than half of their consumers, including the merely curious as well as the most valuable, the insights hiding in that data is truly priceless. It’s time for restaurants to mine it.

New but not new: Data as a function at Thanx

As Thanx’s Chief Data Officer, my job is to help our customers unlock the potential of their data, to learn how to turn observation into insight, insight into action, and action into measurable impact for their business. This isn’t new territory for me — though it’ll now be my primary mission for the first time.

Over the past decade I’ve played a role behind the scenes of helping our customers understand their data and their customers. In 2022 I lead a team that transformed our product with data and storytelling about customer behavior, introducing new metrics like the Effective Discount Rate (a ratio to understand how much discounting a brand is doing that went hand-in-hand with new reward types that had no discount at all, like hidden menus), Activation Rate (the ratio of first-time buyers who brands got hooked into habitual customers), Cart Conversion Rate, Retention Rate, Average Monthly Value, and more. All in all we added over 120 new metrics and visualizations to our product, all tailor designed for restaurants.

Powering all that innovation was a huge investment in our data platform (leveraging industry leading data solutions by Snowflake, DBT, Looker, and others). This investment also unlocked our ability to quickly answer specific questions by our customers, delivering bespoke analysis to help them understand what makes their relationship between them and their consumers unique.

The resounding response from restaurants using Thanx is more demand for this level of service and more of this innovation. In stepping out of my role of Chief Product Officer and into my role as Chief Data Officer I’ll be hiring more dedicated analysts to join those already on our staff and building out more sophisticated analytic services while continuing to pioneer new insights in our products.

A new era of Product at Thanx

While I am stepping out of product leadership at Thanx I’d be remiss if I didn’t take a moment to champion the team who now owns it. Clare Vivarelli, taking over the reins as Head of Product, was my first product management hire at Thanx and has been running product cycles at the company for over seven years. She knows the needs of restaurants inside and out. She’s joined by Max Shuster who has lead product design at Thanx for five years and was recently promoted to Head of Design, and senior product manager Diana Dilanyan, herself a three-year Thanx veteran. As I turn my attention to taking Thanx’s leverage of customer data to the next level, this rockstar group is already hard at work making the next leap with Thanx’s loyalty products, consumer experiences, and marketing automation tools.

Stay tuned

Be sure to follow me on Linkedin (https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/anewton/) as I plan to start sharing valuable insights (and hot takes) from our team’s research on a regular basis.