By Emma Carter, Contributor
The 2024 National Restaurant Association report shows that sales are up and restaurants are hiring. However, labor and food costs have gone up and consumers have become more value-conscious. Guests are also looking for more personalized dining experiences.
Restaurants need to find ways to analyze the large amount of data they generate if they want to supercharge their success. Restaurant data analytic solutions can offer actionable insights that help them to make data-driven decisions. This can help operators increase profitability in an industry where margins are slim and competition is high.
Here are seven areas in which data insights are essential.
1. Understand Your Restaurant’s Competitors
If you want to open a restaurant, you need a thorough understanding of your competitors. This helps you to make decisions based on their strengths and weaknesses. A thorough competitor analysis for restaurant businesses may include access to the following data:
Operations
Menu items and pricing
Marketing methods
Customer reviews
In each area, data can help you to see what’s working for these other businesses that you can learn from. You can also identify a competitive advantage that would make you the preferred choice, such as your cuisine, ambiance, or customer service.
When you first start out, using expensive competitor analysis software may not be within your budget. In this case, an Excel spreadsheet is a cost-effective and easy way to begin. It has great functionality and can help you to analyze data and generate reports. However, you must be careful to ensure you don’t accidentally delete a file or fail to save it. As a Mac user, knowing how to recover Excel file such as an unsaved Excel file or lost Excel file is important. You must know how to retrieve invaluable data that you can’t afford to lose.
2. Improve Your Restaurant’s Inventory Management
It is easy to run out of ingredients or have stock you never use if you don’t manage your inventory properly. You can use inventory management software to help you streamline and automate tasks like tracking, controlling stock levels, etc. Insights from data can help you in many ways.
Know exactly how you use ingredients.
See which vendor they come from.
Know when to replenish them so you don’t run out.
Reduce the food waste you generate.
3. Measure Staff Performance
The performance of your staff has an impact on your profitability. From employee turnover rate to who makes the most sales, using data science for restaurants helps with employee management. Staff turnover is often a big issue in restaurants and access to data can help you to find ways to improve staff retention.
Staff reports can help you to analyze your staff productivity and customer service levels. You may find that some team members are doing well but that others need additional training. You can arrange extra training for them or even a change their role which may improve their retention and performance. Servers who are good at upselling can share their tips and tricks with others. When you reward top performers, it will result in a more motivated team.
4. Optimize Your Restaurant’s Menu
In the restaurant industry in 2024 restaurant analytics and reporting are essential to give you a clearer idea of how to optimize your menu. Menu optimization is a key to enhancing the success of your restaurant. The most popular items on your menu may not be your most profitable items. You need to know which menu items make you more money and bring in more customers.
Customer preferences and trends change, and your menu should too. Menu optimization isn’t a once-off task. The data you collect will help you to:
Identify customer favorites
Recognize items that underperform
Observe trends in customer behavior
5. Manage Guest Relationships
Modern restaurants prioritize good communication when making reservations and managing customers' feedback. Knowing how often your guests return to your restaurant and what they order can influence how you interact with them.
You can pinpoint your VIP customers and elevate their experience with special promotions. Access to customer profiles can help you to identify a favorite drink or appetizer to offer them as a complementary item. This helps to build customer loyalty and retention.
6. Improve Your Restaurant’s Sales
If you use a modern, cloud-based Point of Sales (POS) system it will gather all the data from your sales. This transactional data includes order types, tip sizes, discounts, etc. You can use this data to optimize your sales. When you compare what your sales were over the past week, month, or year, you get more idea of seasonable trends. The use of restaurant predictive analytics helps you to set more realistic targets.
7. Target Your Marketing
You can personalize your marketing based on insights from customer data. Social media marketing and email marketing based on these insights can create more memorable, engaging experiences for them.
When you can segment your email list, you can tailor your emails to each segment. For example, the emails you send to your younger customers will be different from those you send to retirees. This increases the likelihood of conversions when sending discounts or special offers.
Conclusion
Every day is an opportunity to get new insights from data. Having data sources flowing into your analytics system means you can generate valuable reports. These reports can help you to optimize your operations, improve the customer experience, and generate more profits.
