How to improve your restaurant's performance with data
How can you improve your restaurant's performance? Is data a powerful tool to improve restaurant performance?
Using data is more important than ever to make informed decisions about your business, and by tracking and analyzing key metrics, you can identify areas where you can improve your operations, increase sales and reduce costs.
You try to use your restaurant data to make small, meaningful changes to improve your restaurant's performance. Use this data to explore what you're doing well, double down on those efforts, discover what's not working well, and make the changes.
Often times, as a restaurant owner, you look at lagging performance indicators, like sales numbers and bank account balance, but the right information can help you make changes long before your numbers turn red.
In this article, you will learn about the most important information that will help you improve your restaurant’s performance through data.
Why is it important to collect the correct information?
Before you can dig into your business data and start making changes, you have to start collecting it, and there's a lot to collect. Every interaction with your customers is a source of data, and this data is valuable. If your customers place an order, and your team enters the order into your point of sale, Information will be collected when a customer orders through an online ordering site, mobile app or in-store kiosk, and the same data is sent to your point of sale.
But not all methods are created equal. If you accept orders through third-party delivery services, you will not receive customer information. You will only receive the order itself, the order time, and payment.
Inventory, sales, and scheduling information are also important, so make sure they're connected as well.
The Doc Suite system plays a vital role in collecting information to improve your restaurant’s performance. It helps track orders, update restaurant inventory, and record sales data. This system provides a comprehensive analysis of restaurant performance by providing accurate information about peak times, best-selling items, and raw material costs. Using this information, you can make informed decisions to improve your operations and enhance the customer experience, leading to an increase in sales and improved operational efficiency.
How to use the data
The key to your success is the ability to access and use that data. The more data from the more places you connect, the more insights you can gain to improve your restaurant's performance, but they must be integrated together. To better understand the data you have collected, you must Be able to link different interactions to the same entity to ultimately improve your restaurant's performance.
You also need a clear view of each channel. You want to be able to see if order frequency is higher, or order sizes are larger in one channel than another. If online order sizes are larger than in-person orders, it may be an indication that your employees are... Need more training to improve your restaurant's performance.
How to use your data to improve your restaurant's performance
Data in and of itself doesn't do anything. A large database of numbers won't solve all of your restaurant's problems, but it holds the answers to your questions. It's the key to making the most of your restaurant's data by asking the right questions. Here are some examples of areas you can ask questions about. Your data and get actionable answers to improve your restaurant's performance:
Design your menu
Do you know what the most profitable menu items are in your restaurant? How many pepperoni pizzas do you need to sell to make a profit? What is the most profitable drink on your list? What aspect should you highlight during the sales process?
Calculate the profitability of each menu item; To improve your restaurant's performance, then compare revenue numbers, this is how you can find your most profitable menu item.
Once you know your most profitable menu item, you can display it on your menus and online ordering site, you can ask employees to suggest it, and hold contests to see which employee sells the most. This greatly helps improve your restaurant's performance.
Marketing spending
Many businesses have difficulty spending money on marketing because they don't know how to do it effectively. Marketing is often a series of experiments, where some campaigns work well, and others fail. The right data can remove some of the risk from your marketing plan. To improve your restaurant's performance.
By identifying the most profitable ordering method, you can determine where to focus your marketing efforts; To improve your restaurant's performance, if most of your orders through your app are more profitable, you should promote your app more than your online ordering site.
You can also use this information to target your messages. You can create segments of your customers that they have in common. For example, if you have 100 customers who order just one coffee, you can create a segment of people who order coffee, then send push notifications with promotions to those Customers, use the ordering application on your mobile phone and give them a discount on cakes or croissants. This will encourage them to order food with their next coffee, which increases the size of the order, and improves the performance of your restaurant.
Work and scheduling
Do you know, empirically, when your restaurant is the busiest? What times of day, days of the week, months or seasons? If you're in your restaurant, you have a general idea, but having a specific answer can help you improve your restaurant's performance.
If you know that your lunch period ends at around 2:03 PM every day, you know that you need to keep employees available until 2:15 PM. By gathering information about when the dinner rush starts, you will know when to schedule shifts. This reduces headcount when sales are low, but also ensures you have enough staff during peak times.
If you find that you are unable to reduce staff, you can use this information to try to attract more customers at appropriate times; To improve your restaurant's performance, if the place is crowded from 5pm to 7pm, but empty from 8pm to 9pm, you can run a promotion for a specific hour to attract people and improve your restaurant's performance.
What is the role of the Doc Suite system in using data?
DocSuite can help you use data effectively to improve your restaurant's performance in several ways:
Menu Management: You can use the DocSuite system to analyze order data and identify the most profitable items. By understanding what is being ordered the most, you can modify the menu design to highlight profitable items and stimulate sales.
Targeted marketing: Based on order data, you can target marketing campaigns using the Doc Suite system to determine the most in-demand category. You can also encourage customers to use the online ordering application based on the times when orders appear through this medium most intensively.
Optimize scheduling: By examining congestion data at different times, you can use the Doc Suite system to improve employee scheduling. This helps in providing adequate labor during peaks and reducing it when sales are low.
Using DocSuite effectively, you can easily analyze data and make evidence-based decisions to improve your restaurant's performance and achieve better results.
Measure your restaurant's performance to better understand how well you're doing
Another use of your restaurant data is to compare yourself to the market, the competition, the industry, and yourself, how well are you doing compared to restaurants in your city or state? Are you doing better or worse than you did last year?
Benchmark against your industry
Comparing to other restaurants that have business models like yours, how successful have you been? What other companies are doing well that you can copy? How profitable is your business compared to those around you?
Comparing your metrics with other restaurants allows you to see how well you are performing in each area; Improving your restaurant's performance, but it is not easy to obtain competitor information to use for comparison.
If you have a large competing company, they will often have quarterly investor updates available to the public. For example, if you have a local coffee chain, pitting yourself against Starbucks makes sense. It's a large company that has regular financial updates where they detail performance metrics. As a company, you can use these metrics to measure your success.
You can also measure yourself against lists of industry standards. Often, companies use standards issued by local business groups, governments, and industry associations. Check with your local associations to see if they provide industry information for you to use.
Benchmark against yourself
You should also evaluate your restaurant historically. Look at the metrics you track, and compare them to performance a year ago, a month ago, and a week ago; To improve your restaurant's performance, going back a year removes seasonality from your sales numbers and allows you to look at macro trends in your performance. Comparisons to the previous week or month allow you to monitor changes or red flags.
The right information will improve the performance of your restaurant, and the efficiency of your business. Small incremental improvements over time will ensure the success of your business.
DocSuite plays a critical role in benchmarking your restaurant's performance, can be used to track financial and business information, such as sales and cost statistics, and provides detailed analytics on business performance. This system helps you compare your performance with previous periods, and analyze sales and cost trends.
In addition, the Doc Suite system can be used to generate monthly or quarterly reports that show the most important performance indicators. These reports contribute to understanding how your business has improved compared to the past and enhance the ability to make strategic improvement decisions.
In today's data-driven world, using data and analytics can dramatically improve your restaurant's performance. By analyzing customer behavior and preferences, you can create personalized, targeted marketing campaigns that increase customer satisfaction, engagement, loyalty, and revenue. So, make data-driven decisions, and let... Numbers lead the way in improving your restaurant's performance.