Last week I was at CLAP Dubai for its fifth anniversary. If you have not been, it is a Japanese restaurant with a rooftop, a view of the Burj Khalifa, and a show that starts somewhere around the second course and does not really stop. The anniversary turned all of that up. World-class food, entertainment that was immersive rather than loud, and a room full of people who clearly come back.
I was there as a guest, but I was also there as someone who has worked with AlphaMind Group, the operator behind Clap, for three years now. So this is partly a thank-you and partly a few thoughts on what a venue like that teaches you about loyalty.
What five years in Dubai means
Five years is a long time for a restaurant anywhere. In Dubai, where concepts open and close at a rate that still surprises me after living here, it is a real achievement. The city has no shortage of money, views or rooftops. What it has fewer of are venues that sustain a standard, year after year, and build a crowd of regulars rather than a stream of tourists.
Clap has done that. The anniversary crowd was not a launch crowd. It was people who have been coming for years, who know the staff, who have their own version of a usual. That is the thing every operator says they want, and very few build.
Three years with AlphaMind
We started working with AlphaMind Group three years ago. The group runs several of the city’s best-known venues, each with its own identity, and the brief from the start was to build something that connected them without flattening them. A guest of Clap and a guest of Bar du Port are not always the same person, and when they are, they do not want to be treated identically in both.
That has meant a lot of integration work, a lot of conversations about what a reward should feel like in a venue where the average spend is not small, and a lot of time on the floor with teams who take service seriously. It has been one of the more demanding client relationships we have, in the best sense. They push. They know what good looks like because they deliver it every night.
What is coming
I cannot say much yet, but we are in the final stages of a significant milestone with AlphaMind. It is the biggest piece of work we have done together, and it has been in development for most of the past year. When it goes live I will write about it properly. For now, the anniversary was a useful reminder of why it matters: the venues are extraordinary, and the technology behind them has to be good enough not to let them down.
What an evening like that teaches
A few things I wrote down on the way home.
- Entertainment keeps guests in the room. Recognition brings them back. Clap does both, and the second is the harder one.
- The team on the floor knew the regulars by name. No system did that for them. The system’s job is to make sure the newer staff can catch up.
- A premium venue cannot run a cheap-feeling loyalty programme. The reward has to match the room. A voucher that looks like it came from a supermarket undermines the whole experience.
- Anniversaries are a loyalty event in their own right. If your venue has one coming up, invite the regulars first.
Congratulations to the Clap team on five years, and thank you to AlphaMind for three. More soon.
If any of this is relevant to your estate, get in touch. There is more writing here, and the studio behind the work is TheLoyaltyCo.