4 Valuable Restaurant Data Sources You Should Be Using

You know that it’s more valuable to work on retaining your loyal guests’ business over the long term than to toil away, trying to fill as many seats with new customers every day.

Realistically, you could build trust and loyalty with guests by providing good service, good food, and an overall good experience. However, that might not be enough to maximize the customer lifetime value of your restaurant.

If you really want to grow your profit margins, you should tap into the wealth of data at your disposal. That means looking beyond just data that comes from inside your POS.

4 Valuable Restaurant Data Sources

If you’re creating memorable experiences for your customers through various channels, you should take advantage of the data that comes from those sources.

While your restaurant feedback software does a good job of gathering the positive and negative feedback guests directly leave for your restaurant, you’re leaving money on the table if you only analyze data from that source. You need to look at the indirect “feedback” they’re leaving you as well.

You’ll find valuable feedback and data from the following sources:

1. Google

Google is an incredibly important source of data for restaurants. Without it, it would be difficult and expensive to gather data from your own website.

Thankfully, a tool like Google Analytics is free to use and tells you nearly everything you need to know about who’s visiting your website and how they engage with it. That’s certainly helpful for shaping a better online experience.

What’s more, you can use Google’s tools to find out what your visitors do on Google in order to improve the real world experience.

For example, Search Console data shows you which keywords were typed into Google and drew visitors to your website:

You can learn a lot about your restaurant’s key selling points (or what guests interpret those to be) from this keyword list. Do guests like that you’re open late? That you serve seafood? That you’re located close to the convention center, especially on days when big events are going on there?

Use these commonly searched-for differentiators to enhance your online marketing and in-house experience. And, if you find that they’re looking for the wrong things, use your website, marketing, and restaurant staff to better educate guests on what your true selling points are.

2. Social Media

Social media is a valuable source for a number of reasons. For starters, you can use it to collect publicly shared customer feedback and to quickly and effectively resolve issues in private. But you can also use data from it to learn more about your restaurant’s strengths and weaknesses.

For instance, Facebook can show you which posts reached the most amount of people and which ones were the most engaging:

Look at them side-by-side like this and you’ll get a good sense of what kinds of topics or promotions your guests are most interested in.

Instagram does something similar, showing you how well your content performs. This platform would be especially helpful for gauging customer interest in menu items. The ones that get the most likes and shares will clue you in to how the presentation of your dishes, at the very least, appeals to them.

You can also use Instagram’s data to figure out when your followers (and potential guests) are the most interested in what you share by the hour and by the day.

This could be really valuable if you want to share a promotional offer or run a paid marketing campaign to drive traffic in at key times (like when business is slower and you could use more sales).

3. Reservation System

While you can glean a lot of insights online about who your guests are and how to draw more of them into your restaurant, you’d also benefit from data to help you better control that flow of traffic. And what better place to turn to than the control center for that traffic: your reservation and seating system.

Beyond knowing the total number of reservations made each day, consider the following:

• How far in advance were they made?
• What percentage were no-shows?
• What percentage were canceled?
• What percentage were late?
• How many were booked online? Over the phone?
• What is the average group size for reservations?
• Which days and times are most popular for reservations?

Get a sense of how effective your reservation system is so you can configure it for a maximized profit.

You can use this data to adjust other things as well. Like how you manage wait times, when you run online marketing campaigns to target new customers, and how you encourage diners to order in or take out. You want to keep customers happy whether you have tables available or not and this data will help you make decisions that impact how that plays out.

4. Kitchen Software

Order accuracy tracking and inventory management are two of the more common ways restaurateurs use their kitchen software to improve operations. Have you also considered utilizing ordering trends data to your advantage?

Review the analytics from your kitchen software and ask yourself:

• Are guests ordering what you expect them to order?
• Is there a difference between what guests receive dining in or taking out an order?
• Are there dishes you sell out of frequently?
• Are there dishes that you barely sell?
• What’s the average turnaround time for the kitchen to get an order up?
• What’s the most common cause of backups in the kitchen? The time of day? The number of reservations? Holidays? A particular station that’s overwhelmed?
• Are there certain dishes that take longer to make?

If you haven’t already, you should use this data to adjust your menu.

Your goal should be to design menus that optimize how much food you can prepare at the highest quality and get out as efficiently as possible. If that means designing a different menu for people dining in compared to those eating at home, or a different menu for special events, so be it.

Get More Out of Your Data

If you can improve the guest experience, you won’t have to spend as much time putting out fires, apologizing to clients, or trying to clean up a torrent of bad reviews online. Instead, you can spend time improving table turnover, boosting guest retention rates, and selling more.

But you can’t do that without knowing what exactly your guests want and need from you. Your feedback system will help you collect comments they’re actually sharing with you, but don’t forget about other sources that enable you to gather indirect feedback from them as well.