​While it seems like every restaurant has a loyalty program these days, there is significant room for improvement: According to new research from Mercator Advisory Group, only 22 percent of consumers are satisfied with the level of personalization offered by their loyalty programs. Harnessing guest data can help you up your game. Make sure your program is connected to every place a customer can place an order with you, online and off, so you can collect transactional data and use it to personalize your efforts to upsell and cross-sell items, or to target them with exclusive limited-time offers or invitations. A QSRweb report says this approach can help you present real-time promotions that are more likely to hit the mark with guests, like offering a discount on two large pizzas to the subset of visitors who would normally order just one.

​The past few years have given restaurant operators a crash course in the importance of collecting data – about guests, ingredients, sales performance and many other factors. Have you applied this approach to identifying potential staff? By taking the time to analyze data about what works for your business – and not simply casting a wide net and hoping you bring in some good people – you stand a better chance to attracting and keeping staff who are well suited to your business. This report from Modern Restaurant Management advises mining employee data by taking surveys of employees. What is important to them about their position? What benefits would keep them in their job? How does your business measure up to competing businesses (both inside and outside of the industry) when it comes to pay, benefits, growth opportunities and job security? Perhaps you can identify even incremental improvements that could help you find and keep good people. Or, maybe those improvements aren’t possible for you financially. In that case, having this information at your fingertips now can still be valuable in driving you to retool your business model. At a time when so much about a restaurant is learned online before a person even visits, give your website’s recruitment page a tune-up – much like you’d make your online menu more mobile-friendly for a guest. Can an applicant quickly scan the page for basic information about your business and apply on the spot?

Running the most efficient operation you can is hinged on your data. It can tell you everything from how much of an item to order to how much staff to have on hand during a shift, thereby minimizing wasteful spending. But your ability to make informed predictions of your needs relies on the quality of your historical data – your record of recent weeks, months and years. What if your historical data has gaping holes in it? While the pandemic has spurred the adoption of restaurant technology across the industry, the quality of historical data about a restaurant may still need time to improve. Increasingly, restaurant tech stacks are enabling operators to not only adjust their forecasts based on factors such as weather and local events; they are also allowing brands to factor in historical data from similar brands across the industry. Ingest, for one, is allowing restaurants to benchmark against the performance of similar brands to help them get a more complete picture when their own historical data isn’t up to the task.

After a period of two years when technology has demonstrated its worth across a wide range of businesses, restaurants are awash in new data – about their customers, equipment, sales, inventory and more. But any data you collect is only as good as the problems it actively addresses. Make sure the information you collect is working for you by regularly asking some questions of it: What are our most profitable menu items? What menu items need to be adjusted or could benefit from customization? How should I schedule staff during our busiest and quietest shifts? What clues do the data provide about items that could be ideal limited-time offers? Regularly assess the information you’re collecting and identify any loose ends. Any data you generate should help you solve a problem or make an improvement.

There is no shortage of news headlines about the need for restaurants to analyze their data – and to adopt technology that can provide clues about what is going well and what isn’t. But as restaurant operators struggle with labor challenges, adopt new tech to help ease them, and double down on data analysis to better understand performance, it’s important to remember the human element. Specifically, restaurants need to balance their data analysis with a more subjective review of the guest and staff experience. A recent blog post from restaurant consultancy Aaron Allen & Associates relayed the experience of the company’s CEO, who had visited a higher-end national steakhouse chain. He wanted to place a $100-plus takeout order, but there were only two staff members trying to serve the more than 60 guests in the bar area. After waiting for nearly half an hour to place his order, he gave up and left. The especially unfortunate part about this anecdote – and what it could mean for the industry going forward – is that the restaurant’s metrics for the night surely didn’t track the guests who left without food, or the staff members who were burning out from the workload or unaware of the people they didn’t have time to serve. According to their data, it may have been a high-performance night. The industry is at a telling turning point right now: Restaurants are trying to find their footing with smaller teams, and in many cases, are finding ways to use technology to squeeze out profits and otherwise make the current business climate more manageable. But while there are clear benefits to these new systems and ways of working, don’t forget to take a longer view and anticipate the consequences you may not be seeing – the ones your tech stack can’t track.

Out of necessity, robotics and automation are finding new places in restaurant kitchens – to help offload mundane tasks and, in some cases, to keep an eye on staff in an effort to minimize errors and maximize efficiency. According to a recent report from Restaurant Dive, technology known as computer vision is gaining ground in the foodservice industry as a means of identifying inaccuracies in orders and notifying staff who can step in and correct them. It also has the ability to gather data about how staff work together, then provide analytics about who collaborates well in which positions. Providers of the up-and-coming technology include Lifestream AI, Presto and Agot AI.

At a time when restaurants are juggling economic challenges and uncertainty, it can be helpful to zero in on the elements you’re better able to control. Harnessing your restaurant’s data can give you some of that much-needed control right now. That means going as deep as possible on your data: For example, if there is a festival happening in your neighborhood in July, can you adjust your formula to best adjust your plans if the weather is sunny as opposed to rainy, stock up on items that were hot sellers during the same weekend last year, ensure your best employees are working to manage the extra customers, and revise your plan entirely if the festival is suddenly postponed? By combining data about your historical and real-time sales, staff, trends and location, you can improve the precision of your ordering, better anticipate spikes and dips in demand, and aim to have the right number of staff on hand to support you. Is your tech doing all it can to bring greater precision to your forecasting?

Artificial intelligence is set to transform the front and back of the house – both out of efficiency and, due to the labor crunch, necessity. It can help operators manage inventory, monitor waste, identify staffing inefficiencies, adjust production pacing and direct more targeted menu suggestions to guests. But as futuristic as it sounds, it’s only an extension of (and as good as) the data your business has collected about these parts of the operation. Even if your restaurant has no plans to adopt AI tools, it’s important to be able to collect real-time data to build a stronger base for the decisions your business makes day to day. In practice, that could mean tracking sales of each menu item in real time so you’re aware of which customers are ordering them when, if they’re returning for them repeatedly, and if they might pay more for a premium special or cocktail designed with that item in mind if they receive a targeted offer from you beforehand.

​This year, make it a priority to ensure all of the data you collect in your business can tell you a story – about what menu items and promotions your guests are buying, about when you need to reorder an item in your inventory, and about how much waste you’re generating (in food, energy and labor hours). One of the key benefits to the restaurant technology coming to market is that it can help operators pull real-time data about most every facet of the business – then translate that into actionable steps that can help you run your business more efficiently, squeeze out more profit and better weather the kinds of bumps the industry has experienced in the past two years. Looking across your operation, in what areas could you get a clearer picture of what’s happening day to day?

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The supply-chain challenges of the past couple of years have put food sourcing under a microscope, demonstrating to consumers the need to know the origins of the food they eat (and to operators the need to be able to monitor and shrink the supply chain). QSR Magazine predicts that a key trend for this year will be technology solutions that help operators strengthen their connections with suppliers, ensure supplier data integrity and share accurate data with guests. Can you tell your guests a clear story about the path your food takes between its source and their table?