Over the last decade, technology has played a critical role in transforming the competitive food and beverage industry. Convenience has become a significant factor for restaurant businesses to focus on when it comes to customer retention, and technological advancements, like online ordering platforms and online payment systems, have contributed significantly in that realm. Moreover, technological developments, like restaurant analytics platforms, have not only helped restaurants enhance customer experiences but have also helped them track and fix operational issues, such as menu forecasting, staff scheduling, and poor inventory management.

As a reliable restaurant consultant in the UAE, we believe that restaurant analytics platforms have changed the way restaurants go about growing their businesses. With several such platforms now easily available, restaurants have access to valuable information that they can utilize to enhance their revenue, boost their bottom line, and create more effective marketing campaigns.

Here are the best ways in which you can leverage your restaurant analytics platform:

1) Change your menu according to insights
As a leading provider of high-end restaurant consultancy services, we find restaurant analytics a reliable source of insights. It can help you determine which items on your menu are performing well and which ones are not and how they feature in your overall sales mix. Such data can help restaurants assess which items to retain or eliminate from their menus. A restaurant analytics platform helps you to attain the right balance across all categories in your menu.

2) Enhance the customer experience and ROI
Collecting data from multiple sources, such as feedback from mobile apps, social media platforms, and website reviews, allows you to leverage valuable opportunities to understand your audience better, including their preferences. This data, if analyzed thoroughly, can help you improve your customers’ experience and the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns since data-driven campaigns lead to more informed decisions, more accountability, and more transparency. This, in turn, can help retain customers, increase loyalty and improve your ROI significantly. What’s more important is to provide staff in every franchise and on every level access to such data and insights, so they can utilize it to create a personalized customer experience and enhance overall sales.

3) Track inventory better
A restaurant analytics platform, combined with reliable inventory management software, allows you to manage your inventory levels better, which is vital for the overall success of a restaurant business. Inefficient inventory management can lead to high wastage, operational inconsistencies, and low sales and profitability. This is exactly why big data is estimated to be an incredibly significant tool for restaurant businesses. Big data is usually defined as a large volume of data coming from new data sources with more complex data sets. It can be structured as well as unstructured, but it can be beneficial in the sense that it can give you insights that lead to better strategic as well as marketing decisions. Since it comes in large volumes, it cannot be managed by traditional data processing software. With big data, you can go for data standardization, which means structuring large, complex data sets in a uniform format, so data analysts can analyze and utilize it effectively. As a restaurant owner, you should aim for standardization across your supply chain as it helps keep track of overall food costs.

4) Be aware of ongoing forecast trends
It’s important to be aware of how current events or trends can change the F&B industry in the future, so you can estimate the amount of stock you will need. Without being aware of upcoming consumption trends, you may end up ordering an incorrect amount of stock, which can lead to either overstocking or understocking. As one of the renowned restaurant consultants in Dubai, we can confidently say that you don’t want either of the two. So, analyzing stock-related data can help you detect patterns and trends, which, in turn, can help you make an informed estimate.

With so much competition in the F&B industry, margins are tight and restaurants need to endure absolute efficiency on all fronts, which is why technology has become such an important aspect of restaurant businesses today. It allows you to understand your audience better and if you learn how to leverage your restaurant analytics platform the right way, it can lead you to gather and leverage meaningful insights to your utmost advantage.