Restaurants are hungry for actionable insights to maximize revenue from digital ordering platforms.

According to National Restaurant Association, a key economic driver for the restaurant industry’s growth through 2030 will be off-premise delivery opportunities. The success differentiator in this era of fierce competition will be the ability to serve guests when and where they want to be served. “Delivery orders are booming, and business models are shifting fast to find ways to serve that customer base.” To keep pace with every change and innovation coming to food delivery, “data is king.”

Having access to relevant and real-time information on the performance of restaurant locations and digital ordering platforms is essential in an increasingly competitive marketplace. With proper data at their fingertips, restaurant operators can continuously improve on key business metrics such as revenue, costs, and opportunity costs, which in turn leads to higher profits.  

According to another BCG study, restaurants that effectively exploit data and analytics yield 5% to 10% increases in revenue, 10% to 15% reductions in store-level operating costs, and 10% to 20% improvements in EBITDA. 

What data should restaurants be monitoring? 

To succeed in the digital ordering space, restaurant owners should be able to answer these critical questions quickly and effortlessly:

1. What is my total revenue from digital ordering streams? 
2. Which ordering platform contributes the most to my bottom line?
3. Which restaurant locations are leveraging digital ordering the most?
4. What was the down-time of locations, who turned them off and why?
5. Which menu items and modifiers sell the most online?
6. What day and time of the day are best for my sales?
7. How can I get real-time actionable insights?

By having this information readily available, restaurant operators say that they can: 

1. Effectively measure sales and the impact of marketing efforts across ordering platforms and tweak strategies at the right time. 
2. Optimize operations by clearly tracking what items are selling, where and when.
3. Reduce or eliminate missed opportunities by being alerted of actionable insights in real-time. 

Collating Data:

To cope in this new and competitive landscape, restaurateurs have so far manually extracted data from each ordering platform, reformatted the reports, and combined them into Excel spreadsheets. Assume each report takes 20 minutes each day. With an average of two ordering platforms per location, 40 minutes of someone’s day could have been spent honing strategies and taking corrective actions instead. Now, multiply this by the number of locations. Imagine what franchise owners of 100s of locations go through!

With a plethora of ordering platforms in the mix now, there is an urgent need for intelligent systems that automate the entire collation, formatting, and visual representation process. 

How to pick a reporting tool best for you?

While there are many solutions out there, a lot of them even free, here are some pointers to help you decide:

1. Build in-house or outsource: Does your company have the resources and expertise to build and sustain a fully operational analytics platform? Often, restaurants choose to outsource, leaving it to the experts whose solutions you can plug and play. 

• Cost: Do a quick cost-benefit calculation to decide how much you are willing to pay per month for critical information at your fingertips. However, a word of caution when it’s free. When there’s no cost, you become the product. Ensure watertight contracts that protect your data and the usage of the intelligence arising out of it.  
• Consolidation: Check if any of your current vendors, who are already integrated into your digital ordering flow and are connected to your POS, can do this for you. It will save you time and money.  

How ItsaCheckmate can help?

Juggling multiple ordering platforms and ergo manual order processing, along with making sense of your restaurant’s data, can be intimidating! Let ItsaCheckmate help you ditch the tablets once and for all and provide you with a one-stop two-way integration technology through which you can control online orders and menus straight from your POS - updating everything from item availability to pricing - resulting in higher profits, reduced order errors, and happier staff and customers. It also offers a supplementary product called Insights which leverages data from various sources passing through the ItsaCheckmate integration software and presents it to you in the form of unique and customizable Reports, Alerts, and Dashboards.

With Insights you can take quick corrective action to avoid revenue loss by:

• Alerting when a store is offline beyond a set duration
• Notifying when revenue fluctuates more than a customizable threshold
• Displaying relevant details about a location’s status on 3rd party platforms
• Reporting when stores were turned on/off and the reason why
• Monitoring the overall health of your digital ordering channels in real-time, including orders processed, sales generated, average ticket size and much more
  

Click here to learn more about Insights from ItsaCheckmate