2025 in Review, 2026 Ahead: How LoyaltyPlant Is Redefining Restaurant Customer Engagement
Find out how LoyaltyPlant redefined restaurant customer engagement in 2025 and what’s on the horizon for 2026. From gamified loyalty programs and interactive mini-games to AI-powered campaigns and smarter app experiences, this article shows how restaurants are driving more orders, boosting repeat visits, and creating loyal fans. Discover how these innovations engage both guests and staff – and get a first look at the bold updates coming with App 2.0 that promise to make every interaction faster, smarter, and more rewarding.
2025 was a year of meaningful progress for LoyaltyPlant, marked by product enhancements, industry recognition, and a sharper long-term vision. Through every initiative, our focus remained consistent: helping restaurant brands strengthen guest engagement and long-term loyalty.
One of the defining product directions of the year was our deep commitment to gamification. As gamified mechanics became a clear industry trend, we invested heavily in expanding and refining this approach across our platform. In addition to our Gamified Tiered Loyalty module, we rethought in-app lotteries as a standalone engagement layer, building them around anticipation, competition, and continuous participation. Combined with dynamic challenges and mini-games, these mechanics made loyalty more interactive and habit-forming for guests. At the same time, we applied the same game logic to internal motivation programs, transforming employee engagement and performance tracking into a clear, goal-driven experience.
We also celebrated significant industry recognition together with our clients, receiving awards across key categories such as Loyalty, Customer Experience, and Gamification at prestigious platforms including Loyalty360, QSR Media Awards, and Retail ME. Following these recognitions, we were actively involved in large-scale customer and partner events across the US, Europe, and the GCC – supporting launches, sharing joint success stories, and collaborating closely with customers and partners around the globe.
In this article, we highlight the key product directions and updates already delivering stronger engagement results for restaurants worldwide, while also outlining what’s ahead. Alongside feature development, much of 2025 was dedicated to evolving our mobile app experience. To deliver a truly future-ready product – grounded in a new app UX/UI architecture, platform-native elements, and modern visual concepts such as Liquid Glass – we intentionally shifted the app release to the first half of 2026, allowing us to expand its scope and deliver a smoother, more engaging, and more cohesive experience. Further details are covered in the 2026 section below.
Wrapping Up 2025: Key Product Highlights
Throughout 2025, LoyaltyPlant focused on several core product directions aimed at driving restaurant growth, operational efficiency, and long-term engagement.
Our key areas of focus included:
🎮 Expanding gamification as a growth driver for both guests and restaurant teams, using game mechanics to increase engagement, repeat behavior, and staff motivation
📈 Enhancing marketing and campaign capabilities with smarter targeting, automation, analytics, and tighter control over promotions and incentive budgets
💻 Simplifying CRM workflows and self-service for teams, including improved tools for analytics and reporting, marketing management and complex menu configuration
🤲 Enhancing support for end users and restaurant teams through AI-assisted automation, multilingual support, and new communication channels that scale globally
⚙️ Expanding and strengthening the integration layer across POS, kiosks, payments, and courier services, with a strong focus on stability and real-world operational reliability
🚀 Strengthening platform reliability and scalability to support a significant increase in clients and traffic volumes, ensuring readiness for continued growth at scale
Below are the key updates that delivered measurable impact on restaurant performance, guest experience, and marketing efficiency throughout the year.
1️⃣ In-App lotteries deeply integrated into the loyalty experience
We introduced in-app lotteries as a central gamification mechanic within the app. From vibrant pop-ups to real-time counters showing how many players were competing, the app created a strong sense of competition, urgency, and excitement. For brands, the goals behind launching this mechanic were clear: increase average check size, grow the number of new customers installing the app, generate PR buzz, and capture new market share in the QSR segment.
Business impact: Clients saw tangible growth across key metrics, including increased app installs, higher average order value among engaged users, and a noticeable lift in overall engagement and repeat orders.
2️⃣ Mini-Games & Interactive challenges
Alongside lotteries, we expanded mini-games and interactive challenges as additional engagement layers within the loyalty program. This functionality enables brands to increase product awareness and support new menu launches through interactive formats that feel native to Gen Z’s digital behavior. For example, to promote new products, we introduced skill-based mini-games where users slice virtual ingredients to unlock a free menu item as a reward for completing the challenge.
With several clients, we launched calendar-based gamification mechanics – including Advent Calendar–style campaigns – rewarding users with daily incentives on each app visit. Together, these mechanics motivate users to place orders, visit more often, and interact with the app in a playful and engaging way.
Business impact: Mini-games and interactive challenges led to deeper engagement and longer app sessions, increased order frequency, and a clear shift from passive participation to active loyalty.
3️⃣ Employee motivation & Gamified advocacy
In 2025, we extended gamification beyond end users by introducing a dedicated employee motivation system that encourages restaurant teams to actively support app adoption and sales. Game mechanics actively motivate restaurant staff to promote the app through personal referral flows, track their progress in real time, and compete via interactive leaderboards.
A frictionless new customer onboarding flow connects employee referrals directly to customer first orders, turning in-store promotion into a simple, engaging, and measurable growth channel. These capabilities are currently being tested in close collaboration with selected partners and will be rolled out progressively to more customers throughout 2026.
Business impact: the employee motivation system increased staff participation in digital initiatives, accelerated app adoption through in-store channels, and strengthened the link between employee engagement and sales performance.
4️⃣ AI-Powered campaigns & Marketing automation
In 2025, we significantly evolved the platform’s AI-powered marketing and campaign engine, making automation smarter, more flexible, and more precise across the entire campaign lifecycle. Campaign logic now adapts more accurately to user behavior, lifecycle stage, and historical interactions, while improved audience segmentation and more reliable control groups enable clearer performance measurement and continuous optimization.
We also introduced advanced control mechanisms for promotions, allowing brands to flexibly configure how multiple discounts, offers, and rewards can be applied within a single order – protecting margins while preserving marketing freedom. In parallel, survey-based campaigns were significantly expanded: beyond rewarding participation, surveys now enrich customer profiles with structured response data that feeds directly into CRM segmentation, personalization, and future campaign targeting.
Business impact: These improvements reduce marketing spend, increase ROMI, strengthen engagement, improve open and conversion rates, and enable more efficient, data-driven campaign execution across direct channels.
5️⃣ Analytics, reporting & data transparency
In 2025, we significantly expanded and refined the platform’s analytics and reporting capabilities, giving teams clearer visibility into performance across marketing, loyalty, and operations. Reports became faster and easier to work with, with all data available directly within a dedicated reporting section of the CRM. Built-in access controls ensure users only see data relevant to their role and assigned locations.
We added a broader set of reports covering campaign performance, best-selling menu items, and bonus credit usage, while fully tracking all manual adjustments for greater transparency and control. In parallel, we improved the control group mechanism used in campaigns, enabling more accurate performance measurement and clearer attribution of results.
Business impact: Marketers and HQ teams gain a deeper understanding of what drives revenue and engagement, can better control incentives and prevent misuse, identify top-performing employees and loyal customers, and make more confident, data-driven decisions to grow the business.
6️⃣ Operations & CRM efficiency
In 2025, we delivered a broad set of improvements focused on simplifying CRM workflows and expanding self-service capabilities for partners, franchisees, and HQ teams. These updates reduced operational complexity and made day-to-day management more efficient at scale – from campaign and analytics management to menu configuration and location control.
We also introduced automated generation of smart landing pages, promo codes, and QR codes directly within campaigns, providing full visibility into usage and performance. Together, these improvements allow teams to launch and manage direct channels faster and with less effort.
Business impact: Restaurant teams can launch and manage campaigns faster while reducing manual operational effort. Improved self-service and automation lower operational overhead and enable more consistent execution across multi-location networks.
7️⃣ Multi-brand experience
In 2025, we significantly strengthened the platform’s support for multi-brand concepts, enabling restaurant groups to operate more efficiently with multiple brands within a single app and a unified loyalty framework. This approach allows brands to maintain distinct identities while sharing common loyalty logic, campaigns, and customer data – creating a consistent experience for guests and a simpler, more scalable operational model for teams.
One example is smart location filtering across pickup, dine-in, and drive-through maps, ensuring users see only relevant restaurants based on brand and availability. Offers and campaigns are correctly tied to specific locations or brands, improving targeting accuracy and eliminating confusion across multi-brand environments.
Business impact: Guests benefit from a seamless multi-brand experience within a single app, while restaurant groups reduce operational complexity, improve campaign relevance, and scale unified loyalty programs across brands and locations.
8️⃣ Support experience & Intelligent automation
While platform reliability and operational stability remain our top priority, throughout 2025 we also continued investing in the upgrade of our support experience – for both end users and restaurant teams. Our focus has been on making support more proactive, scalable, and accessible across global markets.
We introduced and actively tested AI-assisted support workflows, including AI agents that help handle common requests, guide users through key flows, and reduce response times without sacrificing quality. At the same time, we expanded and improved communication channels, including in-app support chat for end users, making it easier to get help directly at the moment it’s needed.
Support capabilities have also become more multilingual, better reflecting the needs of our international partner base and enabling smoother collaboration with teams across different regions. These enhancements are currently being tested in close collaboration with selected partners and will be rolled out progressively to more customers throughout 2026.
Business impact: Improved support availability and consistency across markets, faster resolution time, reduced operational load on teams, and a more resilient overall experience for both guests and restaurant operators as the platform scales globally.
9️⃣ Connected restaurant ecosystem
In 2025, we continued expanding and strengthening LoyaltyPlant’s integration ecosystem, improving existing integrations and adding new ones across POS systems, self-service kiosks, payment providers, and courier services. Our focus was on real-world operational reliability – ensuring integrations remain stable, predictable, and scalable in high-load, multi-location environments.
A major area of progress was our POS integration framework. We significantly upgraded and standardized our APIs, making it easier for any POS vendor to integrate with LoyaltyPlant. With clearer documentation, improved data models, and more robust event flows, POS partners can now build and maintain integrations faster, with less custom effort and fewer edge cases.
In parallel, we reworked the API and integration flows for self-service kiosks. By introducing ready-to-use tools and clearer integration logic, kiosk vendors can now seamlessly embed LoyaltyPlant’s loyalty mechanics into their solutions – enabling unified loyalty experiences across in-app, in-store, and kiosk journeys using a single platform.
Business impact: Faster and more predictable integrations, lower integration overhead for partners, and a more resilient ecosystem that allows restaurant brands to scale digital channels without operational friction.
🔟 Continuous Improvements Across the Platform
Beyond the major product initiatives outlined above, 2025 included a large number of smaller – and not so small – improvements across the platform. These changes touched nearly every part of the system, from performance optimizations and reliability enhancements to UX refinements and operational tooling.
While many of these updates are less visible on their own, together they play a critical role in making the platform more stable, easier to operate, and better suited for real-world restaurant environments. Our focus remained consistent: helping restaurant teams work more efficiently, improving guest experience across channels, and creating a stronger foundation for sustainable sales growth.
This ongoing iteration and attention to detail allow us to continuously raise the quality of the platform – ensuring it scales reliably as our customers grow and adapt to new market demands.
Business impact: A more reliable and resilient platform, smoother daily operations for restaurant teams, and continuous improvements that support long-term growth and sales performance across diverse markets.
What’s coming in 2026
In 2026, we’re rolling out one of the most meaningful updates in LP’s history. This is not a single feature release or a cosmetic redesign. It’s a major system-level upgrade of how the app works end to end, rethinking the most business-critical user scenarios to drive conversion, average order value, and long-term lifetime value.
While the big visual update is the most noticeable part, it’s only one layer of the work. The foundation of App 2.0 is built on clear business objectives, proven global best practices, product research, data analysis, and extensive A/B testing.
All system, UI, and UX improvements planned for 2026 are structured around five core focus areas:
- Onboarding optimized for activation
- Increasing frequency, engagement, and retention
- Growing average order value
- Reliability and post-order experience
- Hundreds of small details that improve usability
Every feature and flow is designed to support these goals as part of one cohesive system. Below are the key architectural principles behind App 2.0.
1️⃣ Less friction at every step
A core principle of App 2.0 is removing friction across the entire customer journey – especially at moments that most directly impact conversion.
Every screen, interaction, and decision point is intentionally simplified. From faster onboarding and smarter defaults to fewer taps, clearer choices, and reduced cognitive load, the app is designed to move customers forward instead of slowing them down.
For example, customers no longer need to remember or manually enter promo codes. Smart landings automatically activate rewards in the background. They also don’t need to create an account just to start ordering, earning points, or receiving reminders – full value and engagement are available without upfront registration.
Across the experience, unnecessary steps, interruptions, and decisions are systematically removed. The result is faster first orders, smoother repeat purchases, and fewer reasons for customers to abandon the flow.
2️⃣ Smarter logic built into everyday scenarios
In 2026, the app becomes deeply context-aware, adapting in real time to each customer’s situation.
For example, during onboarding we request location access once – not as friction, but as an enabler. This allows the app to instantly preload the nearest store menu and drop customers straight into the correct ordering experience within seconds. No loading delays, no manual store selection, no confusion. This alone significantly reduces early-session drop-off and improves first-order conversion.
Across the app, similar logic applies to how menus are surfaced, how order types are suggested, and how the experience adapts based on behavior and preferences – all in ways that feel natural and effortless to the customer.
3️⃣ AI, by design
Artificial intelligence plays a central role across App 2.0 – not as a buzzword, but as a practical engine driving performance.
During ordering, AI-powered predictive upsell suggestions adapt to each customer in real time. For first-time users, recommendations are based on proven first-order patterns across the entire user base. For returning customers, the system combines personal order history with the behavior of similar customer segments. The “Add to your order?” section surfaces small, highly relevant add-ons directly in the cart – lightweight choices with high conversion potential that increase basket value without slowing the flow.
After checkout, AI continues to work behind the scenes. Predictive order preparation and delivery timing factors in order size, item complexity, peak hours, kitchen load, and live delivery conditions. The system continuously updates ETAs using real-time data, giving customers clear, reliable expectations and reducing “where is my order?” anxiety.
AI is embedded throughout the journey – increasing conversion, growing AOV, and improving trust at scale.
4️⃣ Gamified experience
Gamification is not a standalone feature in App 2.0 – it’s a core design principle that runs through the entire experience.
Rewards are visualized with progress bars, tier indicators, and clear goals, creating constant motivation and small “feel-good” moments. Higher-tier rewards are visually elevated through color accents and design cues, making them aspirational and desirable.
Threshold offers turn upselling into a game: customers see how close they are to unlocking free delivery, bonus points, gifts, or special tickets – with real-time updates as items are added to the cart. These mechanics are inspired by familiar patterns from online games and digital entertainment, making interactions more engaging without feeling pushy.
Animations, transitions, and feedback moments reinforce this sense of progress and achievement, keeping customers emotionally invested at every step.
5️⃣ A bold new UI – fresher, cleaner, more powerful
The new UI brings everything together.
It’s cleaner, fresher, and more modern, with refined layouts, clearer hierarchy, smoother animations, Dark Mode, and platform-native design patterns. Hundreds of smaller improvements – from performance and accessibility to micro-interactions and visual polish – are embedded directly into this new UI layer. Together, they make the app feel faster, lighter, and more premium, while quietly doing the most important work: driving higher conversion, increasing average order value, and building long-term lifetime value over time.
2026 is shaping up to be a big year!
A year of smarter experiences, stronger results, and products that truly work for both customers and brands. We’re excited about what’s ahead – and even more excited to build it together.
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If you’re looking to launch a powerful customer engagement platform in 2026, we’d love to show you what’s possible. Get a demo.
