Sydney-based rib house Hurricane’s Grill – Darling Harbour has adopted mobile gift vouchers with the help of EagleEye.

This move means Hurricane’s Grill is able to offer customers the ability to send gift vouchers instantly via SMS to any mobile phone. The mobile gift vouchers can be purchased online or at the restaurant.

For redemption, the customer enters their unique voucher code into the eftpos terminal, which uses the EagleEye platform for a quick and secure validation and redemption. Each voucher issuance and redemption is tracked in real-time to allow the store to have visible control over financial planning for gift voucher sales.

According to the Hurricane’s Grill, customers also demonstrated their appetite for this technology with mobile gift vouchers outselling plastic counterparts and now accounts for 90 per cent of total gift voucher sales.

Steven Sidd, Hurricanes corporate services general manager, said the company’s goal is to provide the best customer experience for its customers and by moving to a mobile platform, it allows them to do this.

“We now deliver a more convenient and faster service for our gift voucher products to the increasingly digitally savvy customer base, and with real-time reporting it allows us to easily measure our return on investment,” he said.

“The popularity of our mobile gift vouchers has blown us away and we plan to extend this to over more restaurants and to the Apple iOS6 Passbook feature.”

The EagleEye platform is available to all Commonwealth Bank merchant retailers through their eftpos terminal.

George Kaloudis, EagleEye commercial director, said the results experienced by Hurricane’s Grill confirms what a powerful media mobile has become.

“Whilst it is fairly easy to distribute offers via mobile, the real breakthrough we offer is that retailers are able to have real-time authentication of the voucher of the point of sale on their existing eftpos infrastructure,” he said.