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Originally Posted On: https://www.deliverect.com/en/blog/omni-channel-restaurant/how-to-leverage-business-intelligence-for-success-a-step-by-step-guide
In an oversaturated restaurant industry where new businesses (physical and virtual ones) are popping up at every corner, you need to outsmart your competitors to gain an advantage. This is where business intelligence comes into play.
Business intelligence is a term that encompasses the various strategies and technologies you use to analyze important data and turn it into actionable steps for your business. In other words, it allows you to make data-driven decisions to make your internal and external processes more efficient and effective.
As a growth-oriented business, you must implement and leverage business intelligence to build your competitive edge, optimize finances, build brand reputation, and more. Let’s break all of this down and delve into the steps you need to take to make the most of business intelligence for your restaurant.
Here’s what you need to do.
It Starts With Your Restaurant Management System
Business intelligence in the restaurant industry starts with a comprehensive restaurant management system. This system should encompass and pool data from various vital departments and processes, giving you a comprehensive overview.
All your integrations and systems must gather important data on customers and their behaviors, online and offline orders, on-site processes, and more. This is one of the many ways Deliverect offers a comprehensive experience, allowing easy inventory management, POS integration, quick commerce, and more.
You can collect crucial data from your online and offline touchpoints with customers. This data will tell you where your core inefficiencies lie, allowing you to work on those areas. The data you collect will also generate insight into some of the emerging opportunities in the market.
By tracking all of your channels and revenue sources, you can find out what your customers are interested in the most and what channels they’re using primarily. You can then strengthen your sales and brand-building on the most lucrative channels.
Leverage AI to Stay On Top of Customer Interactions
With the rapid rise of artificial intelligence and AI-driven solutions in every industry in the world, it would be hard to imagine not using AI to help your restaurant achieve better results.
To start, you can think of AI integrations as a way to generate useful data and insights faster and on a larger scale. AI is great for data analysis and quick reporting and can help you summarize large data sets into digestible action points.
As far as real-world, customer-facing integrations go, you can always start with an AI chatbot to automate some repetitive interactions and queries. Remember that chatbots are not just there to answer customers’ questions and collect valuable information through these interactions.
Trained AI chatbots can also help you upsell through personalized menu recommendations and bring a more personalized experience based on customer behavior. Over time, you will have a large enough data set to extrapolate trends and opportunities for your business.
Manage Your Partnerships and Investors Wisely
Running a successful restaurant (or a franchise, for that matter) is not just about optimizing your customer experience or your internal processes—it’s also about managing partners.
It’s about managing sponsors, suppliers, and partnerships in general to maximize your efficiency while keeping everyone in your network happy. To achieve this, you must analyze the right data, revisit your contracts and partnership agreements, and look for sponsors that fit your brand and its identity.
The data collected from your business intelligence systems can empower your sales teams and the decision-makers in charge of these partnerships. You can then use that data to create a business proposal template that you can use for future collaborations and when you’re reaching out to new investors, suppliers, and partners in general.
Craft Better Marketing and Advertising Campaigns
One of the biggest advantages of business intelligence is that, when used correctly, it can fuel all your marketing processes and decisions. Above all else, marketing demands hard data and relevant trends and insights to generate the desired results, as you want to make each subsequent campaign more impactful than the last.
The same goes for ads and sponsored posts across social media channels, online ordering platforms, and websites. Every ad you place on any platform needs to generate enough data for you to tweak your campaign quickly and maximize its performance. There is some handy ad tracking software out there that allows you to track every aspect of your ad campaign and automatically collect relevant data and generate meaningful insights.
The more data you can collect about your ad campaigns—such as reach and impressions, interactions and engagement, clicks and conversions—the more data points you have to gauge which ads perform better than others. You can also use this data to combine advertising with your inbound marketing strategies to maximize the cross-sales potential of both.
Keep Collecting Internal and External Feedback
Lastly, business intelligence relies heavily on the feedback you collect manually and directly from your customers and B2B relationships.
In other words, you need to complement all the data you collect through your business tools with the data you collect from your surveys, reviews, and direct communications. Use every customer interaction to collect some data quickly.
When wrapping up an online order, you can display a quick popup asking about their experience. You can also send a review request in an email or a longer survey if you want to collect more in-depth information.
You can then plug that data into your BI data pool to uncover opportunities for your business.
Over to You
Utilizing and leveraging business intelligence tools and strategies is no longer an option – it’s necessary in the modern restaurant industry.
Making better data-driven decisions for your online and offline processes is essential for achieving financial stability and growth in 2024 and beyond. With all that in mind, Now is the time to start leveraging these technologies and strategies to take your restaurant to the next level.
One last critical consideration is the possibility of expansion. Business intelligence allows you to create expansion strategies based on customer behavior, market demand, competitors, and relevant trends in your niche. Use this knowledge and data to grow your restaurant business the right way.
