How data and technology are helping restaurants enhance customer experiences.
November 16, 2022
Sponsored by Amazon Web Services
Whether it’s identifying and targeting the ideal customer or developing simulations to ensure customers receive food orders that are accurate, hot, and ready on time, data can help restaurant operators at every stage. More forward-thinking quick-service, casual dining, and independent operators are taking note — and taking a data-driven approach to drive business decisions and enhance customer experiences.
While big chains are leading the adoption of data and technology, the National Restaurant Association, in its 2030 Actionable Insights report, forecasts that the rest of the industry will follow by 2030. Additionally, the report states: “The growing information ecosystem will require upgrades and integration of restaurant data collection and IT systems.”
Below are ways some operators are already living the data and tech reality—and how others can, too.
Accelerating data collection
“Restaurant brands want to do hyper-specific targeting. To do so, you need to understand the individual consumer, their preferences, their taste preferences, and dietary restrictions. You should understand how they have engaged with your brand in the past and really understand the dining occasion or why they're choosing to dine with you.” – says Steven M. Elinson, Managing Director of Travel and Hospitality at Amazon Web Services (AWS).
To target customers at this level, it’s important to have a single view of your customer. Using cloud-based customer data platforms, you can use identity resolution technology to resolve identities, improve segmentation, and execute more personalized retention and acquisition marketing campaigns across all channels.
Armed with the right data—the specific preferences and dining behaviors of individuals—restaurant brands can then use that information to target the right customers. By elevating your ideal customers’ experience from the first to the last touch points—whether that’s making a reservation or ordering a meal for carryout or delivery—brands can acquire new customers and build loyalty.
Indeed, recent consumer research reveals that 91% of consumers surveyed say they're more likely to make a repeat purchase after a positive experience, and 71% say they’ve made a purchase decision based on experience quality.
Delivering a better customer experience with AI
A particular pain point for delivering a positive customer experience is restaurant reservations, where first impressions matter most. Many independent operators take reservations for dining and private events through phone calls or via email, which can take busy staff members away from their work in the restaurant. To make a better first impression, operators can turn to Artificial Intelligence (AI) that uses intent data to walk customers through the steps they need to take.
For example, customer experience is key for Chef Paul Denamiel, owner of New York City’s Le Rivage, a beloved French spot that offers catering and private dining as well as much-sought-after private chef events. To help save time and money while maintaining quality, Denamiel turned to NLX to build an automated, AI-powered Amazon Connect contact center. The result is a voice-guided, self-service customer journey using a Journey Assistant that starts with a call into a dedicated number and results in an order being placed by a customer within the criteria that Le Rivage can deliver. Most importantly, it’s a customer experience that matches the brand quality Denamiel strives to maintain and delivers that ideal, all-important first impression.
Improving operations with data across the whole business
Vistry is finding innovative ways to help restaurants improve operations using vision, voice and IoT data. Vistry helps restaurant look at data across the whole business, treating restaurants as mini manufacturing plants to help them make sense of what is happening at any stage.
For example, restaurants can better understand abandonment rates when lines get long using a model with license plate data to understand loyalty, or use vehicle make-and-model tracking from vision data. Or, the restaurant can place loop sensors in the ground combined with vision data, and add in point-of-sale (POS data) to get a sense of speed-of-service. This data can be used to then improve gaps in service to reduce those abandonment rates.
Vistry can also help restaurant brands improve quality at their virtual restaurant concepts. They created a solution that pairs POS data with camera data that analyzes how team members are placing food in a bag so operators can identify if an item is missing before the order is given to the customer.
Empowering everyone to be data-driven
Finding new ways to collect and use data is critical, but so is having a central place to store all that data where all stakeholders can access it and use the data to provide a better customer experience. For companies with multiple brands and many locations across the country or even the globe, the Cloud can provide massive amounts of storage, data speed, flexibility, and accessibility, empowering all stakeholders to be data-driven.
Like many restaurant companies, when the pandemic hit Brinker International, the parent to such brands as Chili’s Bar and Grill and Maggiano’s Little Italy, had to quickly shift from on-premise dining to delivery and carryout. To do so efficiently, Brinker knew it had to provide its employees with access to data analytics that could improve each step in a customer’s journey. Brinker migrated the terabytes of data generated across its more than 1,600 restaurants to the Cloud.
Now, with the help of AWS, Brinker’s data lives in Teradata Vantage, a Cloud data platform that enables the leading casual-dining restaurant company to access and merge diverse types of data. For example, merging weather data with delivery and to-go data to predict regional carry-out demand or using data taken from customer surveys and avatars created in Amazon Sagemaker to simulate different models to ensure a seamless carry-out process, and so much more.
Being more data-driven is paying off in many ways for companies like Brinker, as well as independent operators like Le Rivage. For example, recent research shows that data-driven organizations experience more than 30% annual growth. Additionally, Yum! Brands will showcase exactly how it’s improving customer experiences across all channels at the upcoming 2022 AWS re:Invent conference.
In the restaurant industry, data has long been considered a tool to innovate new menu offerings, but more restaurants are using data to innovate—and elevate—the entire customer journey. Partnering with providers, such as AWS, to build the right data-collection strategy and access the optimal Cloud technologies is key for operators of all segments and sizes to enhance customer experiences—and move into the next iteration of the restaurant industry.
