Know Thy Consumer: 3 Tips to Get to Know Your Customers with Tech

It may seem to some that thriving restaurants or coffee shops appear out of the blue, and that it it’s solely because their food is better or their service is unmatched. If you’re not getting many sales, it must be because you are doling out terrible food and service, right? Not necessarily. For example, a thriving burger joint may be no less qualified than their competitor who has seen a downturn in sales; what keeps their doors swinging is how they position themselves based on what people want. The power of branding, customer service, and exciting dishes comes from how they utilize their consumer data. Consumer data and its utilization comes from given information by someone who purchases a product and/or permits the vendor to use their information. The type of information could be name, age, gender, race, interests, buying habits, and so on. Below are a few tips on how to utilize your tech to bring on the sales

1. Optimize Your Inventory

First and foremost, if you haven’t tried this already, you can pull in-depth reports from your POS system. Check out Toast and Square (both systems also have tools for managing inventory). There is so much to learn from these reports, but sales reports hold the key to maintaining the right inventory. We know that 86’ing an item that you rarely put on your menu is a great thing. It can also be rather frustrating when you 86 something that is an essential ingredient to your menu. Reduce those lost opportunities by reviewing how those items have sold in the past. This will let you curate your menu for the best possible results. Not only that, but you can learn a lot about your customer base and their preferences that way, too.

2. Improve your menu

Seasonal menus have been a trend for a long time, but with consumer data, you can learn what items people desire the most year-round. There are a few ways to learn what menu items may bring in more business, and which items need to be removed. While actively conversing with your customers can surely bring about great revelations for your current menu, there are a few other methods to improve your menu, as well.

• Use social media stories and posts to ask for suggestions

• Offer a link to a survey at the end of your receipts

• Review current popular trends on different websites (Eater, Eat.News)

• Analyze reports from your POS System

• Loyalty Programs

Loyalty programs are a great system to reward your most frequent customers, and to learn more about them. Think of actions that you as a business owner value. If you run a coffee shop, maybe that 10th cup of coffee is on the house, or includes a little gift from the kitchen like a free bakery item. A restaurant can offer discounted prices on certain items for loyalty members. The idea is that you’re incentivizing your customers to come back again and again. By tracking your most loyal customer’s purchases, you can see what items are bringing those patrons back. This could lead to highlighting those items on your menu in advertisements outside your shop or on your social media.   

3. Improve The Customer Experience

All of these suggestions we’ve made here ultimately help you grant one wish: having the best overall customer experience you can offer. Like we said in the beginning, that shop who does everything just like you but somehow pulls in more customers does NOT always have better food. What they have is a pleasant customer experience that they replicate time and time again. So the question is, how can consumer data help you and your staff get there?

First, find a way to ask customers for honest feedback. If you haven’t invested time and energy into a CRM yet, look into Bikky, a CRM for restaurants. There are also survey sites like SurveyMonkey, which you could create yourself or find a pre-made one. Those links can be put on your social or your receipt, depending on how adept you are with utilizing your POS (see Science’s abilities here). You can also go online and check out your business reviews on Yelp or Google. Once you learn a little bit more about how people perceive your service, you can then make the necessary changes to turn your dining experience into something that’s one-of-a-kind, just like your business.