Today’s Gold Rush: Data

The 3D Model

In our latest White Paper, The Present and Future of Restaurant Personalization, the discussion around restaurant and customer personalization explores how this industry has evolved and begun to adapt to a new reality: more readily available information on your customers and their behaviors than ever before.

The 3D Model is a tool to help make sense of this new reality and guide your journey down the path towards guest personalization at scale.

Today’s topic is Data; the first “D” in the 3D Model and the one that most impacts the other two. Arguably, data is one of the most important currencies in today’s restaurant industry. Data is everywhere, but what you collect and how you collect and manage it can help you turn it into gold. Additional insight on the other two “D’s” (Decisioning and Dialogue) will be released in the coming few weeks.

Data

Simply put, data is information – information on your customers and their behaviors that can be used to communicate with them in more meaningful and relevant ways, which will in turn increase their engagement with your brand and lead to increased revenue. For example:

The exponential rise of restaurants’ digital offerings in the last year has had a valuable side effect for brands aiming for a fully customized guest experience – a treasure trove of data on individual customer behavior. 60% of restaurant users plan to continue ordering digitally*, and digital orders are expected to grow to over 50% of total industry sales by 2025*.

The first step in leveraging your brand’s data is to put systems and people in place to not only capture as much meaningful data as possible but also to do it in a way such that the data is easily accessible and actionable. Also remember that customer data is not always available to you unless you gather it on your own. Data capture tactics should include:

1. Building or purchasing a customer data platform (CDP) to warehouse the data
2. Integrating all data inputs with this platform: POS – purchase data including transaction-level detail, Online ordering customer data, Email database, Loyalty club data, 3rd party data (credit card, demographic profile matching, et. al.).
3. Investing in the right personnel (internal or outsourced) to manage and analyze the data to develop actionable insights

An explosion of data from new digital purchase channels will enable personalization at scale for restaurant guests. A customer data platform that provides a 360-degree customer view helps brands determine who to target with various offers and campaigns – which gets us to the other two “D’s,” Decisioning and Dialogue, both of which we’ll discuss further in the coming weeks.

Please reach out to us at hello@personica.com with any questions around how to capture data, properly store it and set your organization up for success.  We look forward to hearing from you.

*see White Paper for sources of all referenced data and insights.