Ready to place your restaurant on a trajectory towards overwhelming success? Gaining insights into customer behavior can completely change the scope of any restaurant or brand. By getting to know the fundamental aspects of your customer’s preferences, you can customize their overall dining experience and improve guest satisfaction
Luckily, technology has vastly changed in the last few decades, and you don’t need to rely on memory and limited perception to understand your customers anymore. A good point of sale system can help track and analyze customer decisions to help you make better decisions. However, you will need to understand data analytics to make full use of this software feature.
How to Get Started
Data forms the basis of data analytics, and you need to gather as much customer data as possible. Customers offer quite a bit of data through online ordering, reviews, your website, and especially the point of sale. You may not realize it, but tracking each transaction through a point of sale software solution can yield a lot of data. This data can, in turn, be used to make business decisions that can increase your revenue.
The first thing you need to do during and after the data collection is to ensure the accuracy of the data. This can be a bit time-consuming and tedious, but an absolute must-do for proper data analysis. Once the collected data is filtered, you need to perform an EDA (Exploratory data analysis) for identifying high-level trends. Data obtained through this analysis is then ready for use in data analysis models and algorithms to identify and extract patterns and insights.
Most large restaurant chains tend to lean on big data for data analysis. If you’re a small restaurant owner, then big data isn’t a viable option for you. Instead, focusing on using your POS data is the best way to go.
Uses of Data Analytics
Here are some of the most common uses of data analytics in the restaurant business and why they are beneficial to implement:
Customer Profiles
- Improved Customer Satisfaction: One of the benefits of data analysis is that it allows you to create customer profiles. Once you analyze the POS data, you can profile customers and better serve them with offers, marketing, and other outreach. This helps to ensure both their satisfaction in your restaurant and their impact on revenue.
- Customized dining experience: Profiling customers allows you to customize their customer serving and dining experience order preferences, reservation habits, and demographics. For example, you can offer a bottle of wine at the house if they’re at your restaurant to celebrate a birthday or anniversary.
Efficiency
- Operational efficiency: By using data analytics, it’s possible to make your restaurant business run more efficiently. You can improve operational efficiency, table turnover optimization, sales forecasting, streamlining kitchen activities, reduce food loss, and more. Using data, you can help servers become more efficient by predicting what food will be popular at a given time and day, cutting down on mistakes. Forecasting also helps with efficiently supplying up and minimizing food waste.
- Customer acquisition: Customer acquisition is an essential part of running a restaurant business, and unless done effectively, you will lose out to competitors. Understanding which food items are the most popular in your restaurant’s menu will help you maximize the potential of your marketing efforts, both online and offline.
Staff Management
- Managing staff numbers: If you’re new to the restaurant business, ask any veteran, and they’ll tell you that staff management will become one of your biggest headaches in the long run. But by leveraging POS data, you can handle your workforce efficiently, so you’re never over or under-staffed. You can also use this data to improve other aspects of staff management as well.
- Improving staff performance: Boost staff accountability and gain floor experience using a mobile servicer with your POS. You can also monitor customer tips, which can help you avoid employee disputes regarding tips allocation. It also allows you to manage overwork to prevent turnover and track individual server performance.
Making Use Of Data Analytics To Sustain Your Business
If you’ve been on the fence about updating your restaurant technology and leveraging data analytics, now is the time to do so with the current pandemic that has severely impacted the global economy. By making smart use of the insights obtained through data analytics, you can sustain your business for years to come. Make full use of your POS software to improve all aspects of your restaurant operations.
