5 Types of Restaurant Data You Should Track Today

To summarize, 2021 is an essential year for restaurants to adapt to big data. Up to the present time, the pandemic has taught restaurant professionals that customer data is golden. However, there are various ways that food and beverage leaders should use data. With this purpose in mind, we'll highlight the top 5 types of restaurant data to begin tracking today.

5. Kitchen Data

Understanding and improving kitchen data is essential for smooth restaurant operations. Kitchen data can help determine:

• What is the average restaurant cook time per meal? (Real-Time Order Status)

• How long does it take for a server to deliver food from the kitchen? (Speed of Service)

• Which meals are the most lucrative? (Return on Investment)

Kitchen display systems can help restaurant professionals make crucial decisions based on data points like these. 

Of course, understanding these data is simply the first step. The purpose of obtaining these kitchen data is to consistently improve operational expenses in the kitchen while elevating the customer experience.

4. Guest Management Data

Interpreting guest management data is essential to improve customer experience, as well. Guest management data can help professionals understand:

• What is the average wait time per customer?

• How many people are included in one order?

• How much time does it take to turn a table?

• What is the capacity on average during specific days and times?

Bloom Intelligence helps food & beverage leaders acquire data to:

• Improve wait times.

• Expand party sizes.

• Increase table turn times.

• Grow capacity rates.

3. Email Campaign Data

Analyzing email campaign data is important to help improve many essential data points. 

Bloom Intelligence can help restaurants determine:

• How many subscribers opened the email campaign? (Opens)

• What is the amount of subscribers who clicked on a link in the email? (Click Through Rates)

• What are the successful inbox delivery rates?

The following practices can help improve email campaign data:

• Consistently improve subject lines to increase open rates.

• Regularly and ethically obtain emails from customers using tools like Bloom Intelligence.

• Improve email messaging to increase click-through rates. Customers should clearly understand the purpose of an email in 7 seconds and see a call to action button in each email. 

• Use tools such as Bloom Intelligence to verify email list authenticity.

2. Social Media & Review Site Data

Social media and review site data are essential. They increase rapport and improve the visibility of restaurants in search engines.

Both social media and review site data can help restaurants understand:

• How many social media fans and followers does the brand have? 

• What is the average social media reach of a restaurant? (Reach)

• The multitude of engagement per social media post. (Engagement Rates)

• Determine the best days and times to post to social media.

• The amount of positive and negative restaurant reviews online.

Tools such as Hootsuite, SproutSocial, and Hubspot can help with social media datasets such as these. However, increasing the number of positive reviews per restaurant location is hard to do without Bloom Intelligence.

Bloom Intelligence provides restaurant locations with customer feedback loops to improve positive reviews. After a customer visits, they will receive an email that asks about their experience. If they provide a five-star rating, they will receive another email that directs them to sites like Google, Urbanspoon (now known as Zomato), or Yelp to share. This feedback loop effectively decreases the number of negative reviews that a restaurant receives on average.

1. Customer Data

Customer data is the most important dataset for restaurants to obtain. Without customer data, food & beverage professionals cannot understand their customers. More importantly, they cannot reach them where they are. Customer data includes:

• Names

• Emails

• Postal codes

• Phone numbers

• Birthdays

• First visit anniversaries

• Favorite meal items

• Purchasing habits

Accumulating these data with Bloom Intelligence provides restaurants with a powerful CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool. This tool allows food & beverage professionals to understand the visit times, length of stay, and loyalty rates for each customer that walks through their doors.

Once visitors log into WiFi, restaurants can obtain names, emails, postal codes, phone numbers, birthdays, and more.

These data can get added to automated Bloom Intelligence email campaigns. These campaigns can create an added layer of personalization, equating to increased campaign returns on investment.