Restaurant Operations Benchmarks with WiFi Analytics

Restaurant Operations Benchmarks With WiFi Data

Running a restaurant takes a great deal of time, energy, and patience.

Even with hard work and dedication to food, service and atmosphere, you still need to pay very close attention to your restaurant operations and important to benchmark restaurant operations key performance indicators.

What is Restaurant Operations?

Simply put, restaurant operations include the things that create loyal customers, help your restaurant turn a profit, and avoid potential crises, such as a food poisoning issue and bad customer experiences. There are numerous activities involved in successful restaurant operations.

The ones that are given the most attention include, purchasing food and drink, food preparation, scheduling staff, customer retention, keeping the property clean, and optimizing marketing campaigns, all while keeping costs as low as possible.

When these things are optimized and running smoothly, a restaurant can experience tremendous efficiency and lasting success.

However, to be as efficient as possible, you need accurate and reliable data that you can easily track & understand.

WiFi Analytics Can Give You Vital Restaurant Operations Benchmarks You Need

The only way to be as efficient as possible when it comes to you benchmarking restaurant operations is to have solid, reliable customer data with which you can make intelligent, data-driven decisions.

Thanks to WiFi technology, you can have access to the data you need to make these types of decisions.

Bloom Intelligence has the ability to collect anonymous data from smart devices – cell phones, laptops, tablets – whether customers log into your WiFi or not, and provide you easy to understand restaurant benchmarks.

The WiFi signal includes a code that is unique to that device. No two smart devices have the same identifying code.

The data is called anonymous at this point. All that is known is that there is a device in range of your access point.

The platform will log the information into your database and will track that device’s behavior as long as they are at your physical location, and every time they return.

Again, even if they never log in, you’ll be able to see valuable KPIs, such as:

• Daily Traffic Counts
• Popular Visit Times
• First Time Visitors
• First Time Visitor Return Rates
• Customer Dwell Times
• Dwell Times by Hour
• Average Customer Repeat Rates

These KPIs can give you great insight when making your restaurant operations decisions.

It is in real-time, and from a very large sample size of your actual customers.

 

Measuring Restaurant Operations Benchmarks with WiFi Data

Benchmarking is defined as a process of evaluating a company’s products, services, policies, strategies, etc., against an industry standard.

In other words, you can use restaurant benchmarks to compare your restaurant performance against the average industry statistics.

This gives you more of a data-driven idea of how well your restaurant is performing, where you shine, and where work is needed.

Ideally, restaurant owners should develop the habit of recording these metrics about their restaurant on a regular basis.

This will help not only to identify problem areas, but to spot any dangerous trends before it’s too late to reverse them.

What Benchmarks and Key Performance Indicators Are Available Through WiFi Analytics?

With a WiFi analytics platform installed at your place of business, you’ll have a large amount of data very quickly. This data will be from a very large sample size of your actual customers.

You’ll see valuable KPIs that can easily be applied to your operations decisions, such as:

• Customer Dwell Times
• Dwell Times by Hour
• Daily Customers
• Passers-by vs Visitors
• First-time Visitors
• First-time Visitor Return Rate
• Popular Visit Days and Times
• Customer Churn Rates, and more

Customer Dwell Times and Dwell Times by Hour

Dwell time is the amount of time customers spend at your location.

It’s an important KPI for any brick-and-mortar business to keep a close eye on.

Dwell time is related to several important metrics like customer satisfaction, overall dining experience, and even sales.

Measuring dwell time can give you important insight into your restaurant’s performance. This metric can also reveal potential areas for improvement and growth.

Daily Customers vs. Passers-By

This KPI is very useful for restaurants that have a lot of foot traffic in and around the location, such as in a mall or strip center.

This will tell you what percentage of that foot traffic is coming into your location.

First-Time Visitors and First-Time Visitor Return Rate

When you look over your front-of-house during business hours, do you know what percentage of those guests are first-time visitors? Moreover, are you aware of how many of them are second-time visitors?

Since keeping loyal customers is less expensive than acquiring new ones, these KPIs are crucial for understanding how many of your guests are coming back for more.

Popular Visit Days and Times

This KPI is extremely helpful in a number of areas.

When you’re busy running a business, it may appear at first glance that you’re always experiencing the same customer visitation rates on a daily basis.

In reality, it probably varies more than you think, and it’s impossible to measure your peak visitor times without reliable data. WiFi analytics can provide this data.

Customer Churn Rates

Some restaurateurs will ask themselves:

What is churn rate?

The definition of churn rate is how many customers you are gaining or losing over a period.

Churn rate is traditionally used in relation to online companies. You could easily measure customer churn rate and identify at risk customers.

Now with advanced technology such as Bloom Intelligence WiFi Analytics as restaurant operator you can see your overall churn rate by period, and even target at risk customers based upon a bad rating or there behavior or lack of activity at your restaurants.

Most businesses will experience customer attrition, and restaurants are no exception to that rule.

Likewise, diners have more options than they’ve ever had to choose from.

This is why restaurant owners and retail operators should be concerned with not only acquiring as many new customers as possible, but also creating effective strategies to identify at-risk customers and keep current customers coming back.

Customer Ratings Feedback Loop

Customer ratings and reviews can have a significant impact on your business.

Whether good or bad, these reviews provide priceless feedback you can use to improve restaurant operations and your overall customer experience.

They allow you to recognize specific things that customers love, those that need improvement, and allows you to benchmark your customers overall satisfaction.

Smart restaurant owners and operators are constantly monitoring their online ratings, reviews and conversations about their business.

This is why its critical that success restaurant operators to create a process to survey their customers, and immediately respond to bad ratings or encourage customers with positive experiences to rate your restaurant  on online ratings sites.

Fortunately, Bloom Intelligence Wifi marketing & customer intelligence platform can automate this entire process with our customer ratings feedback loop tools.

They understand that positive restaurant reviews not only generate a great deal of marketing power and social proof, but they contain hidden gems of information about your food, service and atmosphere.

Establish Your Restaurant Operations Benchmarks and Stay On Top of Them

When you analyze your restaurant’s operations benchmarks against the industry benchmarks, you can begin to see the areas in which your restaurant could use improvement, as well as where you are succeeding.

You can then apply more focus and resources on things requiring improvement.

Likewise, you can work to cement the successful areas and make them even better.

Ideally, restaurant owners should develop the habit of recording these metrics about their restaurant on a regular basis.

This will help not only identify problem areas, but to spot dangerous trends before it’s too late to reverse them.

To learn more about the ways the Bloom Intelligence WiFi marketing & analytics growth tools can help you improve your restaurant operations to drive more sales, improve overall customer experience, measure customer sentiment and grow your business, schedule a free demo today.

 

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