For the average restaurant chain, gaining insights into customer behavior can be a daunting task, as customers often decide on impulse where to grab a meal, what form of payment to use and how much personal information they want to share.

For Anthony’s Coal Fired Pizza, a fast casual chain with dozens of restaurants in the Northeast, Florida and Illinois, part of the task was to gain better insight into who their customers were and how to leverage their relationships to keep them coming back.

Paytronix Systems Inc., a digital guest experience platform, has entered an agreement with online marketing platform Zenreach to help restaurants like Anthony’s get a better handle on its guest experience.

The companies said the integration helped Anthony’s develop a wealth of new insights about customers by doubling the reach of its customer loyalty program. The restaurant collected about 150,000 new customer emails and was able to bring back about 1,800 lapsed customers.

Skip Kimpel, Vice President of information technology at Anthony’s said that, before the integration, the customer data from Zenreach had to be manually downloaded and then uploaded back into the Paytronix system.

"This Zenreach integration is part of a larger Paytronix initiative to strategically integrate and build proprietary features that enable our merchants to identify all of their customers and then use the data to grow their concepts through additional unit planning, as well as boosting same-store sales through multichannel engagement," Paytronix head of marketing Michelle Tempesta said.

Paytronix, based in Newtown, Massachusetts, provides customer experience technology for restaurants and convenience stores. Last September the company partnered with Garbanzo Mediterranean Fresh with Paytronix-branded apps for online ordering. Just last month, Jamba Juice partnered with Paytronix to migrate 19 million gift and stored value cards to the company's platform..

Zenreach, a Wi-Fi marketing platform, helps companies track customer visits and develop profile information. The company works with major brands, including Peet’s Coffee, Anheuser Busch and Hakkasan.