Top 5 Restaurant CRM Platforms
The top 5 restaurant CRM platforms
The best restaurant CRM platforms for UK and Irish operators are:
- Flipdish - customer retention built into the ordering platform, with AI marketing and loyalty included
- SevenRooms - made for full-service restaurants and hotels that run on reservations and guest profiles
- Airship - email and SMS campaign tools for hospitality groups
- Marsello - a loyalty-focused platform for multi-channel retail and hospitality businesses
- OpenTable - guest data from bookings, for restaurants that take a lot of reservations
Below is what each one does, where it falls short, and how to pick between them.
What is a restaurant CRM?
A restaurant CRM (customer relationship management) platform stores what you know about your customers - what they ordered, how often they come back, how to contact them, what they like - and uses that to bring them back more often.
It isn't the same thing as the CRM a B2B sales team uses. Restaurant customers don't move through a pipeline over six months. They order on a Tuesday, maybe again the following week, or maybe never. So the job is repeat orders, not closing deals. The data comes from the till, online ordering, reservations and loyalty schemes rather than a salesperson's notes, and most of the marketing runs on its own, triggered by what a customer did or stopped doing.
Without a CRM you're marketing to strangers. With one you're marketing to people who have already eaten your food, already trust you, and didn't cost you anything to find this time round.
Why a CRM pays for itself
Say you have 5,000 customers who ordered at least once in the past year. Without a CRM you can't tell which of them haven't ordered in 60 days. You can't single out the people who always order on Friday evenings and send them something relevant. And when a regular goes quiet, nothing happens. Nobody notices.
With a CRM, lapsed customers get a re-engagement message after a set period of silence. Your best customers hear about new menu items first. Feedback after a visit gets collected without anyone chasing it. And you stop spending marketing money on the whole mailing list when only a fraction of it is likely to order.
Winning back someone who has already ordered from you costs far less than finding a new customer. A CRM turns that from something you do when you remember into something that happens every week.
What to look for
Most of this comes down to where the data comes from and what the system does with it.
| Feature | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| POS and ordering integration | Customer data should come from every order, not just online sign-ups |
| Customer segmentation | You need to split people by recency, frequency, spend and what they order |
| Automated campaigns | Messages should fire on customer behaviour, not on a calendar |
| SMS and email | Customers read both, and some only read one |
| Loyalty programme | Points, stamps or early access give people a reason to come back |
| Reporting | You should see what each campaign earned and what a customer is worth over time |
| Multi-location support | One customer, one profile, across every site in the group |
| GDPR compliance | UK and Irish data protection rules need to be built in, not bolted on |
If you only check one thing, check the first row. A CRM that only sees online orders is blind to everyone who walks in and pays at the counter.
1. Flipdish
Flipdish puts the CRM inside the same platform that takes the orders. Customer data flows in from the Flipdish POS, online ordering, branded mobile apps and kiosks with no data exports and no third-party sync.
What you get:
- A customer profile created automatically from every order, whether it came in online, in person, at a kiosk or by phone
- Order history per customer - how often they order, their average spend, favourite items and usual channel
- Segmentation by recency, frequency, spend and ordering behaviour
- SMS marketing and email campaigns triggered by what customers do
- Loyalty programmes that are points-based, stamp-based or tiered, and run online and in person at the same time
- Vouchers and promotions that apply at checkout on every ordering channel
- AI marketing, an AI agent that works out which customers are likely to lapse and sends them the right offer without anyone building a campaign
- One profile per customer across locations, so someone who orders from two of your sites is one person, not two records
- Marketing reporting covering campaign ROI, customer lifetime value and repeat order rates
The thing that sets it apart is that the CRM isn't a separate tool wired up to the POS. It's part of the same system. A customer orders online, at the kiosk, through the branded app, or by phone with the AI phone agent, and their profile updates straight away. There's no integration to maintain and no sync delay, so no orders go missing.
The AI marketing tool matters most if you don't have a marketing person. Normally someone has to dig out the lapsed customers and build the campaign by hand. Here the agent reads the behaviour and runs the retention campaigns itself.
It suits restaurants, takeaways, QSRs and multi-location groups that want retention tools in their main technology stack.
2. SevenRooms
SevenRooms is a guest experience and CRM platform built mainly for full-service restaurants, hotels and other venues where reservations drive the business. It builds guest profiles from reservation history, dining preferences, spend patterns and notes from servers.
It's strongest inside the restaurant: recognising returning guests, tracking dietary requirements, managing waitlists. Its marketing automation is less developed than Flipdish's. It needs a separate POS to get order data, and it doesn't offer online ordering or kiosk integration.
If you run a takeaway, or a restaurant with no reservation book to speak of, SevenRooms is a poor fit. It's aimed at full-service restaurants and hotel food and beverage operations where the guest experience on the night is what counts.
3. Airship
Airship is a UK-based marketing platform that hospitality groups use to run email and SMS campaigns. It connects to a range of POS and ordering systems and has a workable campaign interface.
It's a marketing tool, not a full CRM. Segmentation depends on whatever data the connected systems pass through, and how hard the integration is depends on your POS and ordering platform. There's no loyalty programme and no AI-driven marketing.
It makes sense for a group that already has a POS it's happy with and wants to add email and SMS without changing anything else.
4. Marsello
Marsello is a loyalty and marketing platform used in retail and hospitality across several channels. You get loyalty points, customer segmentation, email marketing and basic analytics.
The restaurant-specific features are thinner than Flipdish's. POS integration has to be set up separately for each supported system, and the AI marketing tools are less advanced. It has no online ordering, no kiosks and no AI phone features.
It suits businesses that sell through several channels and want a standalone loyalty and email platform rather than something tied to restaurant operations.
5. OpenTable
OpenTable is a reservation platform first. Its customer data comes from bookings, so profiles are built from table preferences, visit frequency and notes from front-of-house staff.
What it doesn't capture is what customers ordered or spent at the till, which means the profiles are incomplete next to a system connected to the POS. The marketing automation is basic, and there are no loyalty programmes, no SMS marketing and no AI tools.
It fits a full-service restaurant that lives on reservations and wants basic guest information from its booking history.
Restaurant CRM comparison
| Platform | Native POS data | Order history | Loyalty | AI marketing | SMS campaigns | Multi-location |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Flipdish | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| SevenRooms | Via third party | Reservation data only | No | No | Limited | ✓ |
| Airship | Via third party | Via third party | No | No | ✓ | ✓ |
| Marsello | Via third party | Via third party | ✓ | Limited | ✓ | ✓ |
| OpenTable | Via third party | Reservation data only | No | No | No | ✓ |
What not having a CRM costs
Restaurants without one lean on word of mouth, social media and marketplace listings to get repeat business. None of those reach your own known customers.
A simple retention campaign shows the gap. Send one SMS a month to everyone who hasn't ordered in 30 days. Suppose you have 3,000 known customers and 10% of them respond to a re-engagement offer. That's 300 extra orders from one campaign. If the average order is £20, that's £6,000, against the cost of 3,000 text messages. Run it every month and the numbers add up quickly.
Those figures are an example, not a promise - your response rate and order value will differ. But the shape of it holds. Texts are cheap, and orders from people who already know you are worth a lot more than the cost of the text.
Data quality and integration
A CRM is only as good as the data going into it. If it only sees online orders, it misses everyone who has ever ordered in person. If it sees POS, app, kiosk, online and phone orders, you get a full picture of each customer.
That's where Flipdish has an edge over standalone CRM tools. Its CRM sits in the same platform as its POS, online ordering, kiosks and AI phone agent, so every order from every channel updates the customer record at once. There's no gap between channels and nothing to keep in sync.
Choosing the right CRM
If you run a full-service restaurant and care most about the in-house experience and managing reservations, look at SevenRooms. If you want email and SMS on top of a POS you're keeping, Airship will do the job.
For most other restaurants and groups, especially ones that want retention marketing without hiring someone to run it, Flipdish is the better option. The CRM is native to the platform, the AI marketing does the campaign work for you, and loyalty and SMS work on every ordering channel without extra integration.
For independent comparisons of restaurant CRM and marketing platforms, see restauranttech.co.uk.