In the food service industry, analytics plays a crucial role in understanding the customer base, generating sales leads, and gaining a competitive edge.2020 saw an exponential rise in the need for restaurant account-based analytics solutions as restaurateurs sought to understand their sector better and make informed decisions.
By leveraging restaurant account-based analytics, food service industry professionals can gain a better understanding of the competitive landscape, track customer trends, and make informed decisions regarding operations, pricing, and marketing strategies.
In this article, we explore the 10 key considerations when evaluating the increasing selection of restaurant account-based analytics solutions.
To start, let’s utilize insights from Brizo, a board and diverse set of data for deeper foodservice market understanding and analysis. Brizo’s data allows customers to garner highly targeted research and prospecting of the foodservice market, and includes in-depth menu data and restaurant tech coverage.
1. Sales Prospecting within the Foodservice Market
Food service analytics solutions should offer comprehensive insight into the unique data fields specific to your sector and help your team to gain deeper insights into customer demographics, eating preferences, and behaviors.
For example, a restaurant analytics solution can provide invaluable insight into competing businesses, pricing points, and menu analysis data, empowering sales teams to engage with the right prospects and accelerate conversions.
2. Prioritize security of personal and financial data
Your analytics solutions should be capable of storing and securing sensitive personal and financial data you gather from your customers and online visitors.
Food service analytics solutions ought to provide end-to-end security and privacy policies to ensure that customer data is not liable to unauthorized access or breaches.
3. Prepare for scalability
As an enterprise requires its analytics solution to scale up with the organization’s growth, financial commitments should be appropriately planned for. Analytics solutions that offer free upgrades as the business grows, or effortless cloud scalability facilitate vast cost savings in the long run.
4. Choose a restaurant analytics solution with flexible reporting abilities
Data analysis and reporting should be effortless and seamless with selected solutions. Restaurants should have the ability to present maximum data within the prescribed timeframe without any technical hassles or delays.
The selected solution should offer standard and customised reporting features that enable quick access and analysis. What’s more, it should also consolidate data from multiple sources into easily digestible reports.
5. Assess the cost vs value equation
Purchase or subscription pricing of analytics should not be the primary consideration when selecting long-term food service market analytics solutions. Instead, focus on vendors who offer value for money, given the data they provide.
It’s important to evaluate the extent to which, data brought in by the platform is versatile, truly actionable, verified, and accurate.
6. Consider High speed data processing
As the data from various channels grows increasingly comprehensive, it is necessary to ensure that the depth and breadth of enhanced data sets aligns with the requirement of the organization. The restaurant analytics package should have powerful processing speeds and bulk data analysis capabilities to store historically relevant data while ensuring real-time data collection and processing.
7. Focus on user-friendliness
A user-friendly interface is one of the key factors to consider while selecting a restaurant analytics vendor. The interface should be simple, easy to understand, and clutter-free. Furthermore, the instructions for implementation, maintenance, or usage of the restaurant analytics solution should also be easy to understand by unseasoned analysts.
8. Identify features to streamline operations
In addition to the standard features such as data collection, analysis, and report preparation, food service analytics solutions should offer additional comprehensive features such as recommendations of up-sells, mapping customer journeys, organizational insights, customer segmentation, personalized journeys, channel preferences, and multi-location analytics.
9. Ensure data accuracy
Good analytics solutions should be equipped with the most accurate and comprehensive data sets. Vendors should offer continuous research and comprehensive updates of data sets to ensure that it remains fresh and accurate.
10. Choose a solution with support from the vendor
While many restaurant analytics solutions offer quality support and customer service, reputed vendors should offer dependable customer service even after the purchase of the product. The quality of customer service and timely help to troubleshoot issues within the package will prove invaluable in the long run.
Being able to make decisions informed by in-depth analytics can be the difference between success and failure in the restaurant industry. Choosing the right restaurant analytics solutions should be an informed decision and, with these considerations, you’ll be able to find the best fit for your organization.