How Big Data Can Help Grow Your Restaurant Business

The seemingly endless potential of Big Data is helping organizations across a variety of sectors generate success through the power of knowledge, and the restaurant business is certainly one that has benefited tremendously from its use.

According to Boston Consulting Group’s 2018 digital maturity survey, data and analytics programs have helped restaurants make improvements including:

  • Increase their revenue by five to 10 percent
  • Reduce store-level operating costs by 10 to 15 percent
  • See improvements in EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortization) by 10 to 20 percent.

So how can restaurants start using Big Data to grow their businesses and make them more competitive? Here are a few ways.

Utilize Sensors and Smart Appliances to Enhance Operations

By tracking how employees and guests use the space, sensors can create an opportunity for restaurants to improve their overall efficiency around traffic flow and wait times. Mediterranean-style restaurant Cava, for example, improved the ordering process and guest experience by mining customer-flow data from sensors placed along its queues.

Additionally, by monitoring inventory and food preparation, connected kitchen appliances and tools can offer insights into how a restaurant can improve its efficiency and order accuracy.

Create a Layout of Customer Data-Gathering Touch Points

Integrating new technologies to record customer data can greatly enhance the dining experience.

From mobile apps to tableside tablets, restaurants are utilizing a variety of digital tools to create a more seamless ordering and payment experience for patrons. And, at the same time, this approach offers restaurants the opportunity to gather insights into each customer’s order history. These purchasing profiles enable restaurants to create more personalized communications tailored to the individual tastes of every customer.

Panera, for example, uses the order history of their customers to create customized email campaigns. A customer who tends to add avocado to their sandwiches will get email recommendations of other menu items with avocado in it.

This helps introduce customers to options they may not have been aware of, while catering to their specific tastes—ultimately, leading to more sales and returning patronage.

Take Advantage of Software that Offers Data-Driven Insights

Gathering Big Data is essential, but effectively analyzing it and making it actionable is the key to growing your business. With the right solution that makes it easy to interpret Big Data, restaurants can make more informed business decisions to improve operations efficiency and enhance the customer experience.

For instance, OneDine’s single-source solution for automated ordering, payment, and customer experience gathers data from POS systems and wearable devices worn by servers and managers.

All of this data is collected and organized within one user-friendly dashboard that offers easy-to-understand, competitive insights into the different steps along guests’ dining journey and how to optimize them. This helps restaurants elevate their service and offers them the opportunity to increase customer patronage.

From creating better customer experiences to implementing more efficient operations, the insights gathered from Big Data can help restaurants build long-term customer relationships, grow their business and become more competitive. However, the key to making Big Data work for you is having the ability to effectively turn that data into action, and the right solution can help restaurants easily do that.

To discover all the ways OneDine’s all-in-one platform can help your restaurant business, contact our team today to schedule a demo.