How Restaurants Can Use Customer Data To Increase Sales
This article will discuss how restaurants can use customer data to increase sales. From fast-casual to food halls, diners have a variety of options currently to satisfy their hunger and their expectations of a good dining experience.
For restaurant marketers, capturing market share hinges are a common goal. That goal is driving more visits from every diner. This kind of improvement begins with understanding your customers. This is an area where many restaurant marketers admit they still have work to do.
As digitisation reshapes the functional and operational outlook of the restaurant industry, franchises and major independents are clinging onto data in the hope that it will help them succeed. There is just one issue, few stakeholders know how to extract meaningful data from it.
This guide will tell you how restaurants can use customer data to increase sales.
How Restaurants Can Use Customer Data: What Is Restaurant Data Analytics?
To put it in simple terms, restaurant data analytics is the process of analysing every datapoint relevant to your business. From there, you convert them into meaningful insights. The purpose is to let you know what improvements you can make to your restaurant to make your customers happier. This could be anything in terms of menu items, staff training to marketing campaigns.
How Restaurants Can Use Customer Data: How Data Analytics Can Boost Revenue
Let’s talk about how exactly restaurants can use customer data to increase sales. Restaurant data analytics will not magically improve your revenue. However, they can present you with robust and actionable insights to help you make invaluable business decisions.
For example, in the case of evaluating sales metrics such as revenue per server, this can help you identify staffing issues that may be affecting your restaurant profitability.
For example, say a server generates the same amount of revenue throughout the week and only certain hours bring a revenue dip. Data analytics will be able to inform you where losses happen. They will also inform you of where you may be able to benefit from additional staff.
Similarly, analysis of the data from your CRM can be utilised to identify why particular items sell well, who ordered what and how much of it and other similar front-of-house insights.
This can be used to fix up your menu. This is because if you analyse what mains are being ordered in what amounts, you can introduce more or less of these items on the menu.
In addition, you can gain an understanding of what menu categories are the most popular. For example appetisers, sides or beverages. This can help you decide which type of items you should highlight in your restaurant marketing campaigns or upsell using your menu ordering platform.
These Are Just Some Of The Benefits You Can Gain From Restaurant Data Analytics.
Customer Profiling
Operations Improvement
Table Turnover Optimisation
Sales Forecasting
Lifetime Value and Repeat Customer Trends
Increasing Average Order Value
How Restaurants Can Use Customer Data: How Restaurant Analytics Impact Labour Costs
Labour is a big expense when operating a restaurant. Therefore, it is crucial to be on top of your labour cost vs your total sales. The right analytics solution will help identify the slower shifts. This helps with keeping low costs as fewer staff are required during that period.
Insights will also help you to schedule faster and more strategically based on what days you are the busiest, when your sales are the highest and how much your average labour spend should be.
In addition, restaurant analytics can be used to optimise labour costs during specific seasons and doing so will help you to control your labour costs. As a result, it will ensure your restaurant is running at its peak capacity throughout the year.
Another thing to note is that by focusing on how you can move parts of your restaurant business online, whether it be online ordering for delivery and takeaway or QR code tableside ordering for dine in customers, you will in turn be able to reduce your labour costs.
How Analytics Impact Menu Decisions
Restaurant data analytics can be used to determine what items you should keep on the menu, which meals need to be re-introduced and what dishes should be considered for discounts and promotions.
For example, if a particular item gets lots of orders, but there are no re-orders for it, you can further investigate. You can combine your data analytics with a customer feedback strategy.
With the correct insights, you will be able to achieve the right balance of items across the different categories of your menu.
How Analytics Impact Guest Experience
When it comes down to customer experience, data analytics can highlight critical insights about restaurant guests. Information such as order preferences, reservation habits and demographics.
These can help you to personalise the dining experience. For example, if it is a customer’s birthday, offering them a free dessert. In addition, the analytics give you the ability to spot trends and segment customers into groups.
Restaurant Data Analytics And Loyalty Programs
Currently, restaurant loyalty programs are equipped with the ability to offer a rich set of customer data. You can also look at the data to determine the best way to reward your loyal customers.
Using a built in loyalty program for your restaurant’s online ordering or tableside ordering is the easiest way of keeping track of your customers’ spend values and number of reward redemptions.
MENUU offers a loyalty program which allows you the ability to offer a free meal or reward value once the customer has reached a certain number of orders. There can be minimum spend requirements, validity terms and reward details set.
You can keep an eye on how many redemptions people have made through the MENUU CMS. In turn, you can group your customer data into segments in order to market different strategies depending on their loyalty.
Conclusion
This article discussed how restaurants can use customer data to increase sales. For the ambitious, revenue-driven restaurant owner, investments in the right tools are necessary to extract meaningful insights.
Therefore, data analytics are essential to increasing sales and giving your customers what they want. In order words, they will ultimately push your restaurant in the right direction where it will experience growth and thrive.
MENUU’s dashboard provides customer data which is easy to analyse and most importantly is ALL YOURS! When you use a white label online ordering provider, your customer data is yours.
Therefore, it is not hidden from you as with third party providers. As a result, the rest is up to you, how you use your restaurant’s analytics in your favour!
