Resy is a hospitality-focused reservations platform powering the world’s best restaurants. More than 2.6 million guests use Resy to make dinner, lunch, and brunch reservations at over 4,000 restaurants globally.

For diners, the journey starts on a restaurant’s website via Resy’s embedded booking widget. Users are prompted to set up an account, create a password, and then reserve a table. The onboarding process at this point is pretty flawless.

Using Mixpanel to closely analyze this funnel, the team at Resy saw that while the first reservation was a seamless experience, subsequent reservations were proving more difficult for users. The team first noticed a problem once users were asked to log-in. “It was like a password rabbit hole,” said Tomer Molovinsky, Senior Product Manager at Resy. “All of a sudden, conversions just fell off a cliff.”

Why Resy Chose Mixpanel

Before coming to Resy, Tomer had used Mixpanel at previous jobs, and the software always came through when he needed insights and A/B testing. Resy’s product team had to find out what was happening in their onboarding funnel and why people were leaving the site or app before finalizing their restaurant reservation.

Mixpanel analysis showed that users weren’t going to their email to get their password, says Tomer. “Now that we knew where in the funnel potential customers were dropping off, we needed to conduct some tests.” It wasn’t acceptable that a percentage of people would get this far only to abandon onboarding. “They were already on or using the Resy app and we wanted to make sure we could complete their reservation,” said Tomer.

"As a consumer Product Manager who is focused on growth, I find that Mixpanel’s funnel analysis tools are second to none. That’s been my experience throughout my career. No other tools that I’ve used have come close to the way Mixpanel helps our teams communicate and parse data.” - Tomer Molovinksy, Senior Product Manager, Resy

User Experience Improvements with Mixpanel

A/B Testing Helped Resy Understand How to Reverse Onboarding Terminations

The analysis didn’t reveal why users wouldn’t check their email, but helped Resy understand ways to fix the problem. So the product team designed a new recommended path in the funnel. Users were prompted to provide a phone number and would immediately receive a text notification with log-in credentials.

“The results of our testing were amazing,” says Tomer. When reservations on the website increased 20 percent month-over-month, it far exceeded the general trendlines. Resy’s restaurant partners fared even better — the completed reservations amounted to tens of millions of dollars of additional revenue.

No-shows Were Already Low; Targeted Messaging Lowered Them Even More

“One of our core metrics as a company is to have the lowest possible no-show rate,” says Tomer. It doesn’t take a lot of dinner-reservation cancellations to wipe out a restaurant’s small profit margin. So Resy started sending text messages asking users to confirm or cancel their bookings.

“Mixpanel allowed us to confirm phone numbers in a way that would be more impactful for our restaurant partners.” The outcome was even better than the Resy team expected. They got the reservations no-show rate to dip 10 percent. That may not sound like much, but it moves the company that much closer to their goal of achieving the fewest number of no-shows as possible.

What’s next?

In 2019, Fast Company praised Resy in their famed “Most Innovative Companies” issue. Now that the company has firmly established itself as a top customer-experience tool in the hospitality industry, the team is getting ready to launch lots of new programs and initiatives. Of course, all of these will need to go through the same stages of testing and analysis as the app’s earlier functions. “There are so many opportunities for us out there,” says Tomer. “I’m very focused on our growth. Not in the sense of ‘success or failure,’ but rather, ‘improvement and impact.’”