Our latest Above the Cloud podcast features Andrea Kayal, chief marketing officer of Upserve, a business management platform for full-service restaurants that emerged out of Swipely back in 2016 following two key acquisitions. In May 2016, Swipely became Upserve, switched from a horizontal to a vertical focus and acquired Breadcrumb POS from Groupon to serve as the foundation for what would gradually become an operating system for restaurants.

Upserve more recently acquired Simple Order for inventory management, with an eye to helping restaurants manage costs and improve profitability. Other elements of the platform, notably its Workforce tools for employee management, were built internally. Upserve recently launched Tableside, a mobile POS designed to make payment acceptance at the table more efficient. Back in October, the company replaced its founder Angus Davis with a new CEO, Sheryl Hoskins, most recently CRO of ACTIVE Network.

We covered a lot of ground with Andrea in our roughly 30-minute conversation, including the restaurant landscape, how Upserve acquires customers, how it views its competitive environment, and what challenges it addresses for restaurant owners.

In the following video excerpt from the podcast, Andrea talks about how Upserve leverages its customer base to drive growth. This will be the topic of a talk Andrea will give at the LSA’s upcoming LOCALOGY: ENGAGE conference in Washington, DC.

You can listen to the full podcast here. The conversation with Andrea begins at the 1:19 mark.

Andrea will be speaking on the topic, “Turning Customers into Advocates” at the LSA’s upcoming LOCALOGY ENGAGE: SMB/SaaS conference, June 3-4, in Washington, D.C. For information on the event or to register, please visit Localogy.com. Here she explains why the event is a good fit for her. 

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