Groupon

Launched in November 2008, Groupon has grown quickly into a daily deals giant. The company offers discounted gift certificates to a variety of local companies, including restaurants, spas, and gyms. By October 2010, Groupon had expanded to 250 major markets, with nearly 35 million registered users. With so much success under its belt, it only made sense to expand further.

So in May 2012, Groupon purchased Breadcrumb, an understated, cloud-based iPad app that had become the most buzzed-about tool in the hospitality industry. With Breadcrumb, servers, bartenders, and owners have full control over their roles. Users can create a menu, input and route orders to kitchen stations, control printers, and much more—all from an iPad. With a slick interface and well-planned features, Breadcrumb eliminates many potential complaints. But when something goes awry, restaurateurs need to know they can rely on Breadcrumb’s customer service.

The website assures customers, “A dedicated Hospitality Success Associate—with restaurant/bar experience—will take care of you, ordering hardware, programming your menu, and training your staff. After you go live, our team of experts is available 24/7 via phone and email. In New York, San Francisco, and Chicago we provide free on-site setup assistance. Every Breadcrumb customer gets full 5-star support, at no extra charge.” To honor that promise, Breadcrumb needed a diagramming tool that could keep up.

Joshua Fruhman, head of deployment for the application, explained how Breadcrumb utilizes diagramming to improve the customer experience:

"Each restaurant that Breadcrumb services has a wireless network that’s either set up or optimized for our service. In order to provide all the right support to those restaurants, we need a network diagram. And we came up with Lucidchart to supply and store reference network maps. A co-worker suggested it, and we really did need it, so we decided to give it a go."

After trying Lucidchart for several months, Mr. Fruhman and his team were pleased with the functionality and flexibility of the tool. He said:

“It did what we needed it to do. . . . We can very quickly and easily draw a network. We can use images from Google or the actual images of the products that we’re using. And we can take links to network charts and put them in our CRM tool quite easily.”

And because Lucidchart lends itself to a huge variety of roles—org charts, mind mapping, flowcharts, and more—the Breadcrumb department has used the tool in several other contexts.

On a broad level, Lucidchart functions as an information library for Breadcrumb. Users create diagrams in Lucidchart and then save them securely in the same application. With all-in-one functionality, troubleshooting and repair become much simpler. Joshua explained that the real problem that Lucidchart solves is providing information on a particular customer to the support team:

When an agent receives a call from a customer, with a question or a complaint that something’s not working, we need to solve that problem as quickly as possible. Obviously, the more information we have about the customer and their location, the quicker we can solve that problem. So Lucidchart helps us provide agents with as much information as possible. It gives them a complete understanding of the local network.

Lucidchart is an affordable, collaborative solution for rapidly growing companies like Groupon and Breadcrumb. The Breadcrumb team uses Lucidchart to solve complex support problems, giving customers and technicians everything they need to resolve issues in a timely manner. Instead of wrangling with technical issues, restaurant owners can focus on serving and pleasing customers. Joshua sums it up this way:

“It’s in the cloud, like we are, and that’s exactly where you want to be. It helps us solve our problems and solve them well."