Will you believe us if we say that restaurant analytics will efficiently help you empower and expand your business?
You can boost your profits by 8-10%, productivity by 17% and products and services by 12% with the help of restaurant data analytics.
You might ask why and how?
As digitalization is in every sphere of marketing, it has also reshaped the functional and operational outlook of the restaurant industry with multiple modern features and trends.
Integrated with POS facilities, every time a customer walks through your door or orders food from you, it gets recorded. The POS keeps a systematic track of the orders, payments, check requests, take away, tips, wait for times and customer feedback or other reviews.
But to keep up with the growing competition, only keeping records or going over the metrics over and over again isn’t enough. You need to figure out a way to sustain and grow in the industry using the same.
Using these valuable insights correctly will help you increase your business’s profitability by improving efficiency, driving growth that in turn will ultimately boost the revenue. Restaurant data analytics plays a key role here.
Therefore, let's take a closer look at what restaurant data analytics is, how it can affect various aspects of your business and how you can use it to shoot up your revenue.
Restaurant Data Analysis is the process of gathering, measuring and combining multiple sets of data of your restaurant that helps to analyze and reveal clear and meaningful insights of your business. With the help of these insights, you can improve every aspect of your business from staff to the menu and any specific section that requires such amends.
One should not compare or confuse it with restaurant reporting, that simply just compares different sales and profit data sets. Restaurant data analysis inspects immense piles of data for your business and brings you the answers to the mysterious whys of the business.
Instead of investing and wasting in looking for meaningful insights at multiple places, you can simply look for such data from a single source that not only will save you time but will also be cost-effective.
You can get insights into what increases your business’s profitability and what on the other hand brings it down. Based on the same, you can tweak your operations, adjust your inventories, train your staff, offer and practice better customer interactions, improve or change menus as per the occasion, etc, to enjoy more success.
Also, these data can offer a notable difference by allowing you to refine your home deliveries and take away orders.
According to researches and surveys conducted studies have revealed that restaurants that use data analytics boost their profits by 8-10%.
However, it’s a huge disgrace to technology that only 12% of companies till now have leveraged the power of data.
This has been made easier with the cloud-based POS system that allows you to track every single data and transaction-related to your business.
Studies have also further shown that along with boosting profitability, businesses that use analytics have increased their productivity by 17% and their products or services have increased by 12%.
This becomes possible as restaurant analytics consider every small amount of data available and bring every single data placed into one single coherent storyline.
It also gives you a complete insight into things such as what payment methods do customers prefer more, waiting times, ordering trends and most popular dishes among customers along with customer reviews. These analytics are capable of giving a smart insight of how much food is wasted, customer take away, number and areas with the highest number of home deliveries, etc, to give a clear and actionable insight.
Unlike other methods, your restaurant analytics can reveal the blind spots that require your attention the most. It allows you to combine different sets of data analytics that need immediate attention and how you can change those weak spots into opportunities by aligning them with emerging trends.
By bringing your clear smaller pictures, you will be able to grasp the bigger picture and get a clear understanding of how and where you should invest your efforts.
Restaurant analytics brings to you valuable insights into your guests that will help you to gain a stronger customer base. POS and CRM data in the short run will help you to define your audience on other hand it will aid stronger customer relationships by nurturing loyalty in the long run.
Factors such as demographic locations of the prospects will enable you to create well-detailed customer profiles, based on which you will be able to make better decisions regarding various aspects of your restaurant such as design, menus, inventory, and even prices.
Moreover, the analytics will also bring you various specific guest preferences allowing you to meet their unique needs and thus establishing a stronger customer base to enhance and enrich their time and experience with you.
You can give them special discounts on their special occasions such as birthdays, or anniversaries or bring them their palate preference customized menu. This will in turn fetch you positive and constant feedback, allowing you to quickly respond to the agendas that seek immediate help.
It won’t be misleading to state that a restaurant’s menu is its bloodline. Among the hundreds of possibilities of deducing why your business isn’t doing well could be the toughest. But, have you considered going through your menu and the ordering pattern of your customers?
You could find your answer hiding in the listed cuisines and beverages. Restaurant analytics will help you to figure out and allow you to learn certain repeat business tricks and strategies.
Provide you with a full picture of your customer appeal, it can further correlate the data points gathered by your POS. It brings you data such as most ordered meals, repeated orders, food reviews and feedbacks, combination orders, seasons’ peak orders and so on, thus by combining such data you will be able to pinpoint the root causes that determine your menu’s success or failure. Consequently, you will learn which dishes to remove, which dishes need to be focused on, which dishes will do better if enhanced a little, how the menu should be organized, when to apply discounts and give offers, etc.
With Restaurant Data Analysis, you can easily get a quick overview of your past and present inventory levels along with the cash and order intake.
Analyzing these crucial points will fill you in with the current status of your inventory, permitting you to place required orders further or replace the non-used stuff with the frequently used ones. This will further lead to managing and minimizing food wastage.
In the long run, not only it will prove to be beneficial to your business by reducing cost, but it will also boost your revenue in turn increasing your profits.
One more low-key advantage of using restaurant analytics is that it may help you predict certain seasonal trends based on consumer behavior or ordering pattern. Thus, preparing in advance or adding a little touch of the occasion will help you to be always a step ahead of your competitors while grabbing the expected attention of your customers.
You can also assess the productivity of your staff based on the measuring standards such as customer waiting time, tips, customer reviews, etc. It will help you get away to analyze their performance and determine which employees are performing as they should and who are slacking off, who require training and who need strict disciplinary action.
Based on such evaluations, you can take necessary actions to motivate, train and push them to reach their goals. Also, you can fix and determine which employees do well on which shifts, and assign them those specified work hours to help them attain their peak as well as improve their efficiency leading to happy customers.
Restaurant data analysis helps you allocate and fix how you should schedule your budget. Among your major growth tactics you can include certain offers, deals, discounts, and even partnerships in a wide range of strategies.
It gives you the insights that you can use to cover certain tactics and always be on a financially beneficial position. You can utilize your already existing tactics and correlate them with the new emerging plans and tactics to make new strategies to place your business in an advantageous position. This will also help you to earn your restaurant desired results by generating revenue.
It also acts as a parameter to assess your tactic’s performance allowing you to make necessary adjustments, wherever and whenever required.
As all your data is being recorded and you also have the listed preferences of your guests, you can easily spot the ongoing trends.
As per the ongoing trend, you can adjust the menus or create certain offers that will help you meet the customer demand. You can easily identify which food items on your menu enjoy customer preferences vs. which ones go unnoticed, how can you rather tweak those menus and build it up with the ongoing trends.
On the other hand, these data serves as a historical chart as you can also fixate the peak/best performing periods of your restaurant during a year/month. This will help you to know how, when and what you can stock accordingly and put emphasis on the same to meet the expectations of the customers.
Ever since the pandemic broke out, the culture of ordering in has flourished and now has become an ongoing trend. Not only it saves time and allow the consumers to eat whatever they are craving from their favorite restaurants at any given period of time, but also has undoubtedly benefitted the restaurant industry.
It has compelled the restaurant businesses to offer their best to the customers to make them want more. Therefore, with restaurant data analytics, it becomes easier to find answers to valuable insights and answers to the questions, such as:
Thus, from giving a clear restaurant data insight to creating an impact on every aspect of your restaurant such as influencing guests, improving menus, generating revenue to home deliveries and takeaways, it is required everywhere. Your restaurant data analysis gives you real-time info so that you can make better decisions while growing constantly.
So, have you started using your restaurant analytics yet?