As you look for ways to make more informed business decisions this year, the data you have on hand will provide a window onto what needs attention – and where you can make the greatest strides. To help, a recent report from Nation’s Restaurant News Intelligence advises operators to add a digital aspect to as many parts of the business as possible – and to aim to ensure the information you collect is complete and provides some nuanced detail about a guest. (For example, the brands that have the best handle on guest data tend to know more than just the person’s basic demographics – they seek to understand the person’s lifetime value, spending habits, order histories and preferred payment method.) Regardless of the kind of restaurant you operate, are there opportunities for you to digitize more transactions, enhance your loyalty program to gather more information on what your guests enjoy, connect every sale to a known guest, and engage guests in more targeted ways? Looking for ways to gather more and better information will help you make the kinds of decisions that can help drive your business forward. No doubt, we have seen significant development in the tools restaurants use to operate in recent years. But when it comes to restaurant categories, we haven’t seen much change in decades. However, according to Meredith Sandland and Carl Orsbourn, restaurant experts and authors of “The Path to Digital Maturity,” there is a new restaurant category emerging: the digitally native restaurant. This is a combination of ghost kitchens, virtual brands, automation, robotics and delivery fulfillment that is optimized for off-premise sales. They believe that once operators find the right approach to this kind of restaurant, the category will grow faster than the rest of the industry. There are a number of restaurant brands that are already testing the waters here, but for the rest, the possibilities of an emerging digitally native restaurant category are likely to change consumer expectations about speed, efficiency and customization everywhere – and necessitate the technology that helps operators deliver on those benefits. Using your tech stack, can you pull information about what your guests are buying, how often, if and when they return, if they buy items on special, how they modify their orders, and which channels they use? How accurately does that inform how much food you make on a given day? |
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