Ask a restaurant owner why they're still running outdated, clunky software, and the answer is rarely "I love this system." It's almost always some version of: "we have years of guest history in there, and I don't want to start over."
This fear is justified under most platforms. Switching systems traditionally means your most loyal guest — three visits from VIP status, with a detailed allergy note and a recorded seating preference — arrives at the new platform as a complete stranger. Their history simply doesn't transfer, and rebuilding it manually, guest by guest, isn't realistic for any restaurant with more than a handful of regulars.
WowMenu's bulk guest import is built specifically to remove this penalty. Uploading an existing guest list — exported from a previous CRM, POS system, or even a well-organised spreadsheet — backfills full historical visit count and spend data into each guest's new profile, not just their name and contact details.
If your loyalty tiers are based on visit count or spend, an imported guest's tier status is calculated immediately from their backfilled history. A guest who was three visits from VIP in your old system arrives at WowMenu already three visits from VIP — they don't experience or even notice a reset.
Most restaurants exporting from a previous system can convert their guest data to CSV format relatively easily. The import process maps columns — name, phone, visit count, spend — to the correct fields, and flags likely duplicates or incomplete records for review before finalising, so messy historical data doesn't translate into messy new data.
For multi-branch groups especially, where guest history might be scattered across several POS systems per branch, consolidating that data during migration — rather than after — is the difference between guests immediately feeling recognised on a new platform versus restarting every relationship from zero.