According to the National Restaurant Association, 47% of restaurants cite competition as one of their top concerns. Another factor is that many food delivery services have created walled gardens around their data, transforming the restaurant and quick serve restaurant (QSR) customer to their customer.
Do you as a restaurateur fully understand who your customers are and what they want? More importantly, do you know how to generate repeatable business by driving customer loyalty to increase customer lifetime value (CLTV)? If not, then dive in so you can better understand how generating more first-party data using diner recognition can help achieve your goals.
Diner recognition is a powerful solution that allows restaurants and QSRs to collect valuable customer data that can be used to tailor offerings and promotions while increasing loyalty and improving the customer experience. This solution leverages point-of-sale (POS) data combined with trade area appends, to identify individual customers so restaurants and QSRs can add those customers to their database.
But what makes diner recognition important? Let’s look at the numbers. According to a McKinsey study, personalized promotions based on customer data increase the likelihood of repeat visits and boost sales by up to 78%. That’s a significant increase that can have a major impact on your bottom line and put you ahead of your competition.
While the bottom-line impact is important, it’s not just about the numbers. Diner recognition helps you create a more personalized and enjoyable experience for your customers. By using customer data to understand their preferences and buying habits, you can offer personalized offers and customized menus that make them feel valued and appreciated.
For example, let’s say your business sells sandwiches in a busy downtown area. With diner recognition, you can identify your regular customers, view their historical purchases, add insights from diner recognition, like household composition and lifestyle changes, and offer them relevant, personalized promotions that appeal to them. For instance, if the data suggests they like fries, an offer for a free side of fries will likely be more appealing than a free dessert. This encourages and promotes a stronger connection, appreciation and CLTV for your business.
Another way diner recognition can boost sales is by helping your business identify new opportunities for growth. According to a 2023 report from Toast Restaurant Success, 45% of restaurant customers go out to eat several times a week. This means you have an opportunity to increase your share of wallet by understanding who these people are and what motivates their decisions when selecting where to eat, outside of drive-time. By analyzing consumer data and trends, you can identify patterns that help you develop new promotions that help people decide to engage with you on- and off-premise.
To achieve ultimate success, you must have an identity and data strategy that ensures you have an accurate, complete view of customers and prospects and that you’re collecting the data that will be the most useful in a responsible and ethical way. It’s time you reviewed your data governance policies and procedures to ensure they align with your business needs. So, to sum everything up, diner recognition is a powerful solution designed to help restaurants and QSRs get the most out of their data coupled with second- or third-party data to support building out an identity and data strategy for engaging with your customers and prospective customers in an intentional way, to increase sales and gain market share.
