How Restaurants Benefit from Data Analytics

Data analytics has become one of the major driving factors for business growth in recent years, restaurants included. Restaurants who have grown into multi-chain outlets have in one way or another utilised data analytics to grow their restaurant business. By analysing current and previous trends. Restaurant managers and owners can predict future trends and be the first to act, gaining a competitive advantage. On top of that, analytics can also be used to reduce costs.

In this article, we share how data analytics benefits a restaurant business.

Improve customer experience & average bill size

A good restaurant POS system is able to help you collect vast amounts of data, presenting them into meaningful reports and dashboards for restaurant analytics. Restaurants can use data analytics to improve customer experience by analysing customers’ ordering patterns.

From there, they are able to provide personalised recommendations which boosts customer experience by creating new value for customers and also, average bill sizes.

This is where adopting self ordering solutions like QR ordering or self ordering kiosks come in handy. After identifying customer ordering patterns, the restaurant owners can add on suggestions to automatically upsell as customers place their orders. This ensures that restaurants do not miss out on any upselling opportunities. 

Better customer loyalty

Restaurants can also use data analytics to boost customer loyalty. By studying customer ordering patterns, visit frequency and date and time of previous visits, restaurants are able to generate more insights.

These insights can be used to do email marketing, loyalty programmes and personalised offers to their returning customers. This way, restaurants can re-engage their customers with the right offers to boost customer retention.

Reduce operational costs

Inventory and manpower costs are one of the main operational costs incurred by restaurants. One of the biggest challenges of inventory management faced by restaurants is to prevent excessive food waste but at the same time, not understock resulting in menu items becoming unavailable to customers.

This is where analytics comes in handy. By analysing trends, restaurants can be more accurate in forecasting how much ingredients to stock up, thus maintaining an optimal inventory level that reduces operational costs.

Data analytics can also help restaurants identify hours where more staff are needed, allowing restaurants to better deploy their manpower to prevent overstaffing during off peak periods.

Interested in using analytics to improve your restaurant’s performance? Click here to find out how MEGAPOS’s restaurant POS system consolidates data to provide you with insightful dashboards and reports for data visualisation. On top of that, MEGAPOS also integrates to business analytics tools for further in depth analytics should your restaurant require.