Use data to your advantage
Technology is a powerful means to get data about your restaurant. For example, a POS system that collects data, reviews on social networks and your own website. You probably already manage more data than you think. Are you currently using this to your advantage?
Data can provide you with a lot of insight and optimise processes. As a result, you get on top of your organisation more. By analysing data, you can reduce personnel costs or offer better services to your customers by responding better to their preferences. Read on below and get ready for the future.
Who are my customers?
By building a customer profile, you get more insight into the people buying your meals. In this way, you can react better to their needs and can get higher ratings in your reviews. Does a customer always have complex, personalised orders?
Optimising the Menu
Let your POW system collect data about products sold. A good menu is, in most cases, clear and offers various options, without having too many products. ‘’Less is more’’.
Furthermore, a cost-efficient menu offers purchasing benefits because you can use ingredients in multiple dishes. Changing your menu during the season can also bring advantages. With the introduction of new dishes, you can first introduce these to subsequently gauge how popular the dish is.
Improve service
By analysing reviews, you can better determine where your customer’s wishes lie. However, please be aware that research has shown that people are more quickly inclined to post a negative, rather than a positive, review. By merely looking at the reviews you therefore get the wrong picture about what your customers actually really think of your restaurant.
You can supplement the information from online reviews with telephone reviews. By ringing five customers every evening and personally asking them their opinion, you get a better picture. You can immediately use this opportunity to offer them a discount voucher for your own website, in exchange for a few minutes of their time. However, when you do this, work with a questionnaire drawn-up beforehand, because this can allow you to convert the phone calls into data.
Cost saving
By keeping track of the hours worked by your staff, a POS system can calculate a labour rate. A formula in which the turnover is compared against personnel costs. In this way, it can show that on certain days structurally too much or too little staff are employed The trick is to find the ideal balance between ‘coping with a busy day’ and not cutting down on your service and quality
Certainly now that the labour market is tight and staff are hard to find, a labour rate is a very valuable tool. However, there are still many more ways of measurement that can present you with cost savings. For example:
- Purchase of ingredients/stock management
Which dishes are experiencing a lot of loss?
- Marketing
Where and how do I use my marketing budget most effectively?
- Optimising your menu
Which products are selling well and which less so? Is this changing during different seasons?
Website/marketing
By zooming in on the question: ‘Who are my customers in actual fact?’, you can determine how turnover has been shared between the various target groups. By determining these groups en carrying out multiple marketing campaigns on them, you can measure which method works best with each target group. You can base your marketing activities on this.
A good website records a lot of data about your customers so that you can draw up an optimum profile. However, this data is not complete. In this, you do not have the online order platforms data that you have joined.
Good Order management software is of significant importance in this. Order-Catch combines all the orders, and lets you see the data for all your orders. Regardless of the order source.
Applying the data
By understanding and reading the data of your restaurant, you can identify trends and problems. You can respond to trends with marketing campaigns and remedy problems since you know where the problem comes from. You can even make predictions based on your data for a new dish, for example. What makes a popular dish so popular? You can think about this and use it as inspiration for a new dish. With the technology to collect data you know more about your restaurant!
The catering industry experience of the Order-Catch team, in combination with our support, is an important benefit of using Order-Catch. The online order market is growing considerably quickly and is here to stay. In this day and age, restaurant customers are on the lookout for more convenient ways of enjoying tasty food without leaving the house. Order-Catch will help you access the online order world and will make it easy for you to receive online orders and, in so doing, obtain information. Order-Catch will help you with the broad choice in parties and will streamline the order process. With an Order-Catch link you will get access to the online order world and you will gather information about your restaurant!
