Data Analytics in Restaurants: How Technology Can Benefit your Business

Technology is reshaping the entire outlook of businesses and providing a way for franchises and independent joints to cope with competition in this modern business landscape. 

There are several benefits of data analytics in restaurants- 

Data analytics in restaurants are a good way to understand customer behaviour and create agile tactics that will help them improve their customer experience and also improve their efficiency. 

A restaurant data analytics software or API provides insights that can help restaurants make small changes and increase their revenue. 

It is important for restaurant owners to recognize the competitive edge that data analytics provides. The biggest challenge is to extract useful information from the data. Here are some ways in which restaurants can benefit from data analytics- 

Customer Behaviour 

RFM analysis stands for regency, frequency, and monetary value. This allows restaurant owners to understand what kind of customers the business is attracting. It can help understand how many customers are loyal customers, how many are new to your business, and how much money they typically spend in one visit. 

It can also help businesses analyse their footfall. What time of the day is there maximum footfall? When does the business see the least number of customers. This also helps optimize labour cost and helps in staff management

It can also help restaurant owners analyse the popularity of their dishes. What dishes are ordered most frequently. What dishes are ordered during a certain time. What are the food combinations that are the most popular? 

It can also help to analyse the customer reviews to understand their likes and dislikes. 

Not only this, it can help analyse competitor’s reviews to be better than them.

Inventory Management

Data analytics in restaurants not only helps understand the customers and enhance their experience, but it also helps manage a restaurant’s inventory and help them save time and money. 

Stocking items and inventory management are one of the main factors for restaurants. Using predictive analytics on historic data can show during specific hours, which dishes/items are ordered more. This can help in deciding the stock management.

Data analytics in restaurants can be used for inventory data to see how much quantity of ingredients and groceries were wasted in the past. This can help with efficient decision-making.

Menu Analysis 

Another great benefit of using data analytics in the restaurant business is menu analysis. It helps to Identify the popularity and profitability of each item. 

This can further help create the most profitable and popular combos and offers

Data analytics in restaurants can also help in clustering the customers with the same orders into one group. It will be easy to form many clusters to send out promotions and offers.

Apart from this it also helps owners perform a price analysis to reach the most beneficial price point to drive up sales. 

Restaurant owners can also analyse what items generate the highest revenue and where they are facing losses.

Predictions and Projections

Data analytics in restaurants, like in any other business, can be used to better understand the future and growth of the business. 

Predictive Analytics can be used on historical sales data and comparing it with the current sales data to predict where the restaurant will be in the next few years.

It also helps in forecasting sales. It shows sales using charts. You can use it to compare revenues for two months, observe quarterly or half-yearly revenues.

Marketing Benefits

Data analytics in restaurants helps create effective marketing strategies. 

Owners can observe the trend seen each month in a year, and the trends that are seen annually. This will help them derive strategies like discounts and offers. 

It can also help in deriving a social media strategy and marketing campaigns based on this.

A good restaurant data analytics software can also help analyse the turnover rate, ROI, sales, and discount marketing after running a marketing campaign.

Personalization and Offers

With increasing competition comes an increasing need for a personalized user experience in order to form good customer relations. Data analytics in restaurants can help achieve this goal- 

Recommendation engines discover data patterns by learning customers’ choices and produces the outcomes that correlate to their interests. Developing a recommendation system that sends out promotions. 

The recommendation system can also help the managers or waiters in suggesting dishes to the customers based on their previous orders.

It can help create loyalty programs like if a customer has tagged or given a shout-out to the restaurant on the social media pages, they can be rewarded with some discount.

A data analytics system can also help to add some exclusive features like refer your friend, upon the first bill to that restaurant by that friend. The referral will get some points which they can redeem in participating restaurants.

A system like this can also help in sending offers prior to the customer’s birthday or anniversary, helping create a personalized experience. 

What features should you look for in your data analytics system to ensure success?

1. Easy to use hence we need to focus on easy UI/UX having minimal clicks to reach the final checkpoint.
2. Show statistics on a dashboard in such a way where restaurant owners can derive data in a few clicks and in the desired format. Also, the charts should be pluggable where customers will decide which data needs to be shown on the dashboard.
3. Autosuggestion is the key element for success. Our system needs to be capable of drawing customer attention by showing them some autosuggestions. For example- if a customer ran an offer last month but has not run the offer this month then the system will suggest creating an offer.
4. The system needs to be interactive and should answer customer queries and provide some suggestions accordingly.

Investing in a data analytics system or software for your restaurant can help you drive up sales and revenue with great ease. It will automate integral processes and help you better understand your business. To get benefits of analytics hire experienced data analytics agency that can improve your business growth.