Blog
8 Ways Restaurant Data Analytics Can Grow Your Business
5 min read
Mar 6, 2024
5 min read
Mar 6, 2024
In the era of big data, analytics are critical to running and scaling in the restaurant industry. The competition is fierce, and the only way to succeed is to keep customer satisfaction at the heart of your business model. More often than not, restaurateurs have more data available than they know what to do with. But that data becomes useless if you don’t leverage its full potential to improve your business.
Let’s discuss the benefits of leaning into restaurant data analytics and ways you can leverage it to enhance the customer experience.
In its most basic form, restaurant analytics is a method for using all the data your restaurant has and turning it into actionable insights. Analytics goes much deeper than “reporting” because it tells a more detailed story about why certain aspects of your business are thriving (or not thriving).
You can use restaurant analytics to answer almost any question you may have about the status of your business, such as:
Put simply, if you can measure it, you can answer it, act on it and optimize it.
Of course, technology hardly replaces human experience — the wisdom of your experience is often just as valuable when making business decisions. Point of sale and customer relationship management (CRM) solutions are meant to work in tandem with human intuition. When used together, you unlock insights you wouldn’t get otherwise. These measurable data points inform your staffing, food ordering, menu design and restaurant layout, all of which are key elements of an inspired customer experience.
Data analytics has the power to transform a restaurant in many ways by providing insights on how to foster deeper guest relationships and become more profitable.
Customer data is everywhere — you just need to know where to look. Read on to discover eight ways you can find and apply restaurant data analytics to drive revenue and make operations more efficient.
When you leverage a robust hospitality CRM to collect guest data from reservations and online orders, you gain access to information that helps you better understand your guests and how best to serve them. Think dining preferences, special dates like birthdays and anniversaries, and dietary restrictions. And by integrating your POS system, you can layer in even more data like order preferences and spend history.
Using this data, you can deliver unexpected special touches that help your FOH team make a lasting impression, like offering a complimentary, favorite glass of champagne or securing a guest’s preferred corner booth in the back.
With restaurant data analytics, you can ensure your marketing efforts generate a profitable return.
Vandal restaurant in Sydney, Australia, saw a 30% growth on social media and a huge spike in engagement rates on Instagram through targeted marketing efforts after their guest data tracked in the SevenRooms CRM uncovered the restaurant’s true audience demographics.
A loyal following does wonders for your bottom line. Creating a profitable loyalty program requires knowing who your guests are and what they want so you can personalize their journey.
Leverage the guest data housed in your CRM to identify repeat guests and their dining preferences.
As they make reservations and dine with you over time, you can offer birthday perks, anniversary promotions, referral bonuses, priority seating and other benefits reserved for VIPs only.
In a turbulent economy, simply filling tables is no longer enough. Restaurant businesses need adaptable strategies to not only put butts in seats but maximize every cover. With a data-driven approach to restaurant management, your CRM can give you a better understanding of what you need to do to sell the right seat to the right customer for the right amount of time.
For example, if your average turn time for a two-top is 90 minutes, but your reservation timeslots are in two-hour windows, your dashboards can highlight these inefficiencies and allow you to adjust accordingly.
SevenRooms’ table management system helps you generate the most revenue for each shift, according to demand. Its automated seating algorithm reviews over 10,000 combinations per second to maximize your seating potential during your busiest and slowest times.
The restaurant industry continues to struggle with high turnover rates. To find and retain talent, you can leverage your POS system and/or staff management apps like Lightspeed and 7Shifts to identify slower shifts and peak times and see exactly how much staff you’ll need, and when.
Then, dig a little deeper to evaluate your staff performance. Reward top performers, see who shows up to work on time most consistently, who drops the most shifts, who generates the most revenue, asks for the most time off, etc. This information can help you determine who to promote, who needs extra training and who to replace, ultimately reducing labor expenses and increasing profit margins.
Your cloud-based POS system can be a powerful tool for restaurant reporting, too. By accessing data in real-time, restaurant owners can easily track the status of food supplies, change inventories and adjust shipping schedules. These forecasting insights are key for reducing food costs and optimizing inventory management because you’ll lower your chances of overbuying ingredients.
Restaurant profit margins are notoriously slim, so it’s important to create a menu pricing strategy that doesn’t alienate your desired clientele. Not every dish is good for business.
By studying sales data, you can better understand what customers are ordering, how much they’re spending and what dishes make you the most money. When combined with customer feedback analysis, you can adjust your menu to ensure guests have a variety of options to choose from.
If you have multiple locations, data can help you create a seamless customer experience across all your restaurants. Information-rich guest profiles allow your team to treat guests like regulars at every location — like accommodating a gluten allergy for the guest who dines at your New York and Los Angeles locations.
More importantly, you can identify overarching reservation patterns and sales trends by looking at data in a consolidated database, like a CRM. By understanding the data, you can better allocate resources (both human and financial) to improve profitability. For example, analytics can uncover if a menu item is more popular in one location than another, enabling you to create custom promotions across all venues.
When Solotel onboarded with SevenRooms, they consolidated data across 26 venues, unlocking key performance insights previously unavailable to them. Learn how the Solotel team identified profitable upsell opportunities by looking at restaurant analytics that generated over $120,000 AUD in incremental revenue in the first half of 2023.
In such a competitive industry, any tool that provides restaurants with an advantage is worth exploring. SevenRooms’ robust hospitality CRM, revenue management and data analytics features were built with restaurants in mind, unlocking ways for data-driven operators to customize experiences, market intentionally and maximize efficiency. Book a demo today.
