Duane Lyons

According to the National Restaurant Association, 9 out of 10 consumers like going to restaurants and there are more than 1 million restaurants in operation. If you step back and consider restaurants as a retail category, it is one of the few that is growing in the e-commerce age. As a matter of fact, technology such as food delivery is accelerating the growth and taking away from the traditional grocery business.

As consumers spend more money on dining and less on other ‘brick & mortar’ retail categories, it becomes even more important for a restaurant to understand who their diners are and how to customize their experiences to improve their dining experience. Furthermore, a savvy restaurant operator understands that the dining experience does not start when the diner walks into the restaurant. It starts whenever they start trying to decide where to enjoy their next meal at and includes all their social media interactions between visits.

At Dinelytics, we believe this end-to-end dining experience can be measurably enhanced by providing a robust ‘Diner Profile’ and appropriate recommendations to the appropriate staff (or even the diner) at the right time. Unfortunately, the restaurant industry is an industry that extensively leverages different solutions (typically SaaS-based) to support different functions. It is not uncommon to see a restaurant using one or more systems for reservations, another for private parties, another for e-gift cards, another as their POS, another for outbound e-mail / SMS messaging, and another for loyalty program administration (if a loyalty program exists). Each of these key systems exist in silos and house valuable data about their diners and their behaviors. Unfortunately, these silos are exactly that – silos that are stand-alone and unintegrated.

Our approach to solving this problem is to deliver value quickly and incrementally. We recommend the following approach if you are a restaurant or restaurant group that relies on an online reservation platform used by many of your diners:

Start by integrating the data about the diners and their reservations in your reservation systems and tickets / transactions in your POS into a common, secure environment. Advances in technology are making this easier. For example, most of the reservation platforms allow API access for restaurants to access their reservations and diner profiles. Furthermore, despite the plethora of POS platforms used by restaurants, there are also technology solutions to make it easier to access the POS data regardless of the POS system being used. Leverage the appropriate business logic to link each reservation to one or more POS transactions. Depending on the quality of your data, linking 80%+ of your reservations that checked-in to POS transactions is very doable. Once this is complete, the really fun stuff that improves the dining experience and increases revenue can begin. This includes being able to easily answer the following questions every day:

Who are my best customers, how much do they spend AND what are they eating/drinking? Who are my diners that have churned? Which diners are more likely to churn? If I own multiple restaurants and each has its own reservation system, which diners are frequenting the different restaurants I own? Thinking ahead, which of my reservations tonight should I pay more attention to? How do I personalize their experience? Being able to answer the above questions (as well as others) is great, but insight without action has minimal value. As a result, we recommend taking an ‘Insight-to-Action’ approach that includes:

The ability to import diner segments / lists (based on the above) into your e-mail / SMS messaging tools. Similarly, the ability to import diner segments / lists into social media platforms such as Facebook to either target specific customers or a ‘look alike’ audience if your goal is to attract new customers. Lastly, how are you going to financially measure the financial value of your actions? At Dinelytics, we are passionate about helping restaurants and restaurant groups better understand their diners. We also believe that a better understanding of your diners will drive an improved experience and increased revenue. If you are interested in learning more about how we can help your restaurant or restaurant group complete this entire process in a month or less, contact us in the form below.

Article also available at https://www.dinelytics.com/take-ownership-of-the-relationship-with-your-diners/

Duane Lyons

Greater Chicago Area 3K followers 500+ connections

About

Experience

Wavicle Data Solutions

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Education

DePaul University

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