A loyalty program for your Montréal café or restaurant

What a digital loyalty system looks like at a Montréal counter

The rush is short and it is loud. It comes in the morning, or again at dinner, and the line reaches the door. Whatever you add to that counter has to survive it. Paper cards end up in a drawer beside the till, and nobody installs an app with a lineup waiting behind them.

A wallet pass fits a gesture that already exists. The customer is holding a phone because they are about to pay with it. They point the camera at a small card by the terminal, tap Add to Wallet, and the pass is on their phone before the drink is. Staff scan it the same way every time, in seconds, with nothing to type.

That is the ambition here: a program you can run at full speed on a Saturday, in a room too loud to explain anything twice. If you run a café, the morning-rush version of it is on our page about loyalty programs for cafés.

The city, one neighbourhood at a time

Montréal is not one market. It is a stack of small ones, each with its own hours, its own languages and its own regulars. A café on Saint-Viateur in Mile End lives on the same faces most mornings. A dining room in Petite-Italie fills on Friday and empties on Tuesday. Griffintown eats lunch on weekdays and barely exists on Sunday. Vieux-Montréal has a tourist summer and a resident winter, two different customers.

The Plateau, Villeray, Rosemont, Hochelaga, Saint-Henri, Verdun, NDG and Outremont each have their version of that, and all reward the same thing: knowing who your regulars are and giving them a reason to come back once more. A stamp card that lives on the phone does not care where the counter is. What changes is what you put on it, and that is what we work out with you.

A dinner service asks different questions from a morning rush, and those are on our page about loyalty programs for restaurants.

French by default

In Montréal a loyalty program gets read in two languages before lunch. The screen your customer looks at, the message on their card and the explanation your staff give at the counter all have to work in French, then in English for the person right behind.

LoyalTea is built French first. The enrollment page, the pass, the rewards page a customer opens to claim something, the staff app and the web dashboard exist in French and in English, and French is the default. Nobody changes a setting to be served properly.

The page you are reading has a French twin at the same address with /fr in front of it, written as a French page rather than translated late. That is the standard we hold the product to.

Working in Québec: the law, and where the data goes

Two facts frame any customer program run in Québec. The Charter of the French language governs how you serve and communicate with customers in French. Law 25 governs personal information: what you collect, why, who you share it with, and what happens when it leaves the province. Neither is something a software vendor can carry for you.

What we do is narrower, and we would rather say so plainly. Every screen a customer sees can be in French. The service providers that touch your customers' information are named in a document you can read before you sign anything.

Our Privacy Policy names the service providers we use. Some of them store or process personal information outside Québec and Canada, primarily in the United States. As Québec's Law 25 requires, we assess those transfers to confirm the information receives adequate protection, and you can contact our Privacy Officer for details about a specific one. Our Merchant Terms say the same in the schedule on hosting outside Québec.

Written down, in both languages, so you can point at it when a customer asks.

How it works, in three steps

The mechanics are the same on Sainte-Catherine and on Wellington, and short enough to teach a new employee mid-shift.

1. 1. Customers scan and addThey scan your QR code and tap “Add to Wallet”. No app, no form. The pass is on their phone in seconds.
2. 2. Staff scan the passAt the counter, staff scan the pass with a phone camera or a plug-in USB scanner: earn, preview, confirm, undo.
3. 3. The pass updates instantlyStamps or points land on the pass right away, and rewards are redeemed from the customer’s personal rewards page.

How we work with you

We set your program and rewards up, launch it at your counter with your staff, and then run it for you: you tell us what you want, we make the changes. You keep full access to the merchant app and the web dashboard, and you can reach us whenever something needs to change.

What stays yours

Running the program for you only works if taking it back is trivial. None of it is held away.

• Your program: stamps or points, what a reward is, and what it takes to earn one. Change your rewards and how customers earn them yourself in the web dashboard, or ask us.
• Your branding on the pass: your name and your colours in a customer's wallet, not ours.
• Your counter routine: staff scan with the LoyalTea Merchant app on any phone, using the camera, or with a plug-in USB scanner. Earn, preview, confirm, undo.
• Your record: every scan goes to a ledger that only ever adds, with the staff member attached, and reversals traced instead of erased.
• Your call on the customer app. A LoyalTea customer app is in the works, and it will always be optional. Everything above works from the wallet pass.

Choosing between tools is its own job, and we wrote a page about the criteria rather than the brand names: how to choose a loyalty program for your café or restaurant.

What it costs right now

Free during the pilot, and we set everything up with you.

Montréal questions