Hatch Loyalty and CARDFREE Partner to Deliver Combined Customer Engagement and Mobile Wallet Solution to Convenience Industry

Hatch Loyalty and CARDFREE’s integrated solution will streamline the customer experience and provide convenience retailers with rich customer data.

Today, customer engagement and loyalty platform, Hatch Loyalty, announced a new partnership with mobile commerce leader, CARDFREE, combining capabilities to bring personalized engagement and mobile wallet services to large retailers. Powering some of the highest volume mobile ordering applications in market today, CARDFREE’s partnership with Hatch Loyalty will provide gas stations and convenience stores best in class order-ahead, stored-value, engagement and loyalty services.

Retailers have long known that it is cheaper to retain customers than to acquire new customers, but new research also suggests that customers engaged in mobile visit twice as often as non-mobile customers.

Hatch’s approach to customer engagement and loyalty is rooted in the belief that loyalty is more than just a discount; it is an outcome of a great customer experience. Hatch uses customer data to help retail partners drive conversion and diversify sales by delivering more personalized offers and recommendations.  Finding new paths of engagement, including mobile activation and payments, is key to reaching that goal. Historically, mobile consumers have a higher lifetime value than other consumers and adding loyalty increases both frequency and spend.

“Loyalty is an outcome of a great customer experience, which includes new ways of engaging customers via mobile,” said Dan Gloede, CEO of Hatch Loyalty. “We believe customers that order-ahead and leverage mobile payments technology ultimately help drive value for retailers. Jon [Squire] and the CARDFREE team recognize this, and have built an industry-leading mobile wallet platform.  We believe our partnership will allow both of us to extend solutions that retailers need, and consumers love.”

CARDFREE’s end-to-end enterprise mobile wallet platform allows retailers and QSRs to engage consumers and helps merchants increase frequency and spend. The CARDFREE platform offers a one-stop solution for merchant-branded mobile wallets including services such as stored value, offers, order-ahead and rich data/analytics. Adding Hatch Loyalty services to the platform will further enable personalized offers, real-time engagement and self-service tools.

“Merchants that use our full platform services including order-ahead, payments, offers and loyalty tend to see the most shift in behavior,” commented Jon Squire, CEO and founder of CARDFREE. “We believe Hatch’s experience and focus on gas and convenience will be tremendously beneficial to a combined solution.  As we looked to expand our reach outside QSRs, they were an obvious partner because of their platform approach, and unique capabilities to drive personalization of the customer experience.”

Order-ahead is no longer a nice-to-have for retailers serious about driving merchandising sales, driving nearly 2 billion transactions per year.  With strong demographic leanings towards millennials, these capabilities, along with payments, represent a major opportunity for retailers looking to engage with the mobile-motivated consumer.  CARDFREE and Hatch believe personalized customer engagement will further drive this engagement.

The net result for retailers? A unique pairing of personalized customer engagement programs that drive engagement to mobile for best-in-class wallet capabilities.

From the team that deployed the three largest mobile wallet initiatives in the U.S., CARDFREE® offers merchants a one-stop solution to mobilize and enhance the customer experience for maximum ROI. CARDFREE® offers complete, integrated solutions for merchants from mobile and online through to the POS. Our award-winning platform provides end-to-end capabilities such as mGifts, messaging, smart offers, loyalty, payments, order ahead and social media integration. CARDFREE® is headquartered in San Francisco and has been recognized as a “Fierce 15” company by Fierce Wireless. For more information, visit www.cardfree.com or contact [email protected]

Hatch is a simple, adaptable platform designed to help retailers and brands build stronger relationships with their customers. More than a loyalty company, Hatch makes insights actionable, enabling a more personalized and meaningful customer experience for retailers of all sizes. The world’s largest retailers and brands have access to the Hatch platform’s full configurability, while small- to medium-sized businesses can access Hatch’s off-the-shelf marketing solution, Belly, which is already an industry-leading solution. Hatch Loyalty is headquartered in Chicago, Illinois and received funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Lightbank, NEA, and DAG Ventures. For more information, visit www.hatchloyalty.com