Adding Loyalty to a Petpooja Restaurant

The short answer

Petpooja's built-in loyalty program lets a restaurant reward customers with points on every bill, stored in a virtual wallet tied to their phone number and redeemed at the counter with an OTP. You configure it inside the POS, there is no separate hardware, and beyond your Petpooja plan the main running cost is SMS credits. It works, but the whole system leans on SMS delivery, which is exactly where it gets fragile.

This guide walks through how the Petpooja loyalty program is set up and redeemed, what it costs, how it stacks up against third-party apps like Reelo and Bingage, and where a wallet-native card fits if SMS keeps letting you down.

What is the Petpooja loyalty program?

Petpooja loyalty is a points-and-wallet system that sits inside the Petpooja POS and CRM. When a customer pays, the POS credits points to a virtual wallet linked to their mobile number. Later, those points can be converted into a discount on a future bill. Because it is native to the POS, staff never leave the billing screen to award or redeem, which is the single biggest reason small restaurants adopt it.

Two ideas do all the work here:

• Earn: a formula that turns rupees spent into points, for example 1 point per Rs 100 on the bill.
• Redeem: a conversion that turns points back into money off, confirmed by an OTP at the counter.

There is no physical card and no customer-facing app in the basic setup. The customer's identity is simply their phone number, and their balance travels by SMS.

How do you set up loyalty points in Petpooja POS?

Setup lives in the loyalty or customer management section of the Petpooja dashboard. The flow is short:

1. Enable the loyalty program for your outlet.
2. Set the earn rule (points per rupee or per bill).
3. Set the point value on redemption (what one point is worth in rupees off).
4. Choose an expiry window, if any.
5. Turn on the SMS templates that tell customers their balance and send OTPs.

What is a sensible points-per-rupee formula?

Keep the math simple enough to explain in one sentence at the counter. A common, safe starting point for a casual dining or QSR restaurant in India is around 3 to 5 percent of the bill returned as loyalty value. For example:

• Earn 1 point per Rs 20 spent, and 1 point equals Rs 1 off. That returns 5 percent.
• Earn 1 point per Rs 100, and 1 point equals Rs 3 off. That returns 3 percent.

Whatever ratio you pick, model it against your average order value and gross margin before you launch. A dessert-heavy menu with fat margins can afford a richer reward than a thin-margin thali counter. If you want a fuller breakdown of earn rates and reward design, our restaurant loyalty program guide covers the numbers in detail.

Should you set an expiry?

An expiry protects you from an ever-growing liability of unredeemed points and gives lapsed diners a reason to come back before their balance vanishes. A window of 6 to 12 months is reasonable for most restaurants. Avoid aggressive 30-day expiries, they punish exactly the occasional customer you are trying to convert into a regular.

How do customers redeem Petpooja loyalty points?

Redemption happens at billing and runs on an OTP:

1. The cashier searches for the customer by phone number.
2. Petpooja shows the available points and the rupee value.
3. The cashier applies the points to the current bill.
4. An OTP is sent by SMS to the customer's phone.
5. The customer reads out the code, the cashier enters it, and the discount is applied.

The OTP step is a genuine fraud control, it stops staff from quietly draining a customer's balance. It is also the step most likely to stall a queue, because everything after "apply points" waits on an SMS arriving on time.

How do you check a customer's loyalty balance?

Pull up the customer record by phone number in the POS or CRM and the current point balance is shown alongside their visit and spend history. Customers themselves usually learn their balance only from the SMS Petpooja sends after each transaction, there is no standing card or wallet screen they carry with them.

What does Petpooja loyalty cost, and who is it for?

The loyalty feature is bundled into Petpooja's CRM capabilities rather than sold as a heavy add-on, so there is typically no large separate licence for the basic points system. The cost that actually scales with you is SMS credits. Every earn confirmation, every redeem message and every OTP is an SMS, and at a busy outlet those messages add up into a real monthly line item.

Petpooja's own loyalty is a good fit if you already run Petpooja, want something basic, and value having everything on one screen. It starts to feel thin once you want segmented campaigns, birthday offers, win-back nudges, or messaging on a channel your customers actually open. For a wider look at retention tactics beyond points, see how to win back lapsed customers.

Petpooja loyalty vs Reelo, Bingage and m'loyal

Many restaurants outgrow the built-in points and bolt on a dedicated loyalty and CRM app that integrates with Petpooja. Here is how the common options differ in how the customer actually holds and hears about their rewards.

The third-party apps generally beat Petpooja's native loyalty on campaigns, reporting and messaging. What most of them still share with Petpooja is a dependence on a push channel, SMS or WhatsApp, that you do not fully control.

Where the Petpooja loyalty program falls short

The weak link is not the points math, it is the delivery. Almost everything the customer experiences arrives as an SMS, and SMS fails silently and often:

• DND and spam filtering quietly drop promotional and even some transactional messages.
• Wrong or mistyped numbers at the counter send the balance to nobody.
• Delivery lag stalls the OTP while a queue builds behind the customer.
• SMS credit costs grow with every regular you add, so success gets more expensive.

There is also a quieter gap: the customer never really carries anything. There is no card in their pocket, no icon on their home screen, nothing to remind them your restaurant has a program at all. When the reward is invisible between visits, it stops changing behaviour.

The wallet-native alternative

The fix for the SMS problem is to stop making SMS the product. A wallet-native loyalty card installs straight into Apple Wallet or Google Wallet with no app download. The card lives next to the customer's boarding passes and metro tickets, and it updates itself over the air whenever they earn a stamp or a reward, using Apple Push and the Google Wallet API rather than a fragile SMS.

That single change removes most of the failure modes above. There is no OTP round-trip to stall the queue, no DND filter to dodge, and no per-message SMS bill scaling against you. A push to a wallet pass lands for free and shows up as a lock-screen notification when the customer walks near your outlet, which is exactly when it matters. If you want the mechanics, we break them down in our guide to Apple Wallet and Google Wallet loyalty cards.

Punchd is built around this idea. Staff still scan a QR at the counter to award stamps or redeem rewards, so the counter workflow stays as fast as Petpooja's, but the customer holds a real, self-updating card instead of chasing a text message. You can run it alongside Petpooja billing, or use it as the loyalty layer if the built-in one has been letting you down. It suits full-service restaurants, and the counter-speed model works just as well for a quick service restaurant.

Troubleshooting: why did the loyalty SMS not arrive?

If you stay on Petpooja's SMS loyalty, most complaints trace back to a short list of causes:

• Check the number. Re-read it back to the customer at billing. A single wrong digit sends everything into the void.
• Check your SMS balance. If credits run out, earn messages and OTPs silently stop.
• Check DND status. Customers on Do Not Disturb may never receive promotional templates.
• Allow for lag. Gateway delays of a minute or more are normal at peak, do not resend the OTP three times.
• Test with your own phone weekly. A quick self-test catches a broken template before customers do.

If you find yourself running this checklist often, that is the signal that the channel, not the program, is the problem.

The honest takeaway

Petpooja's loyalty program is a reasonable, low-effort way to start rewarding regulars without buying anything extra, and for a single outlet that just wants basic points it does the job. Its ceiling is SMS: fragile delivery, growing message costs, and a reward the customer can never see between visits. If those cracks are showing, a wallet-native card is the natural next step, same fast counter scan, but the loyalty lives in the phone your customers already carry.

Punchd gives every customer an Apple Wallet or Google Wallet loyalty card with no app to install, live updates instead of SMS, and an AI engine that drafts win-back campaigns for you. Customers never pay, and merchant plans start at Rs 1,599 per month. See the pricing page to compare plans, or explore how Punchd works.