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| Data Science for Restaurant Business |
Today, the data science field has wide scope in almost any type of business, the machine learning tools and techniques have empowered and encouraged several business sectors, so as for Restaurant Businesses too. Every business seeks for the latest technologies to sustain in the market and to compete with the big brands.
Data science offers optimized machine learning algorithms for predictions and decision-making process. Helps in the extraction of meaningful information from the raw data (historical data) like hidden trends, new opportunities and also reveal dangerous blind spots. For Restaurant Business, based on historical data like customer information(reserved, walk-in customers and mixed ones) their feedback responses, frequency of visits in a week/month/year, days on which they prefer to visit, record of peak traffic on weekends/festive seasons, also vendor details, record of raw food Warehousing and Inventory accounting, etc.
In order to manage the restaurant business smoothly for all days of the year there’s a need to consider some points like to how to meet each customer’s expectations, how to increase productivity and make high revenues, how to expand the business, what are marketing and branding strategies and how to lower operational costs, how to engage new customers, how to maintain food quality as well as serving quality, timely availability of various food items/dishes as per the menu card, how to compete with competitors.
The solution is here:-
Know the Demographics of your customer —
Find out the age group categories by using clustering techniques along with demographic data of your frequent customers. Knowing their age-groups, provide them with some best offers as per their tastes so as to maintain strong relationships with them.
If your customer stays nearby restaurant location provide them free home delivery offers.
Automating business process —
Automating ordering and billing to ensure ease of transaction by providing apps. Use of Virtual Reality menu application for customized order serving.
Automate some internal as well as external tasks so that staff would save that time for fulfilling the customer’s satisfaction. Also the use of chatbots. The right use of Automation helps to decrease operational costs, thus increases ROI.
Track the quality of services provided by the staff —
Timely upgrade the staff’s skills and ensure their quality of behavior and hospitality towards each customer. This will help to get the best feedback and brand value will increase. Chances of getting more customers.
Optimized Marketing strategies —
Use the digital world and reach out to online social media groups interact with food bloggers and influencers. Have personalized suggestions of dishes to each customer based on their past order and feedback data, turn your customers to promoters. Know the demands and bring new dishes.
Suppose if, they like pizza then they are likely to buy some drink products too. You can also predict dish suggestions for new arrival customer as per their order choice.
Customer behavior —
Each customer has a different taste sensation. Track the customer lifestyle like on which day they come to the restaurant, are they daily comers or the festive and weekend ones? For festive ones, you can offer or promote some festival dishes. Check what is their dressing style, and what items they bring with them when they arrive at the restaurant accordingly you can predict their best tasting sense.
Optimize predictions —
Track customer’s food ordering style, you can predict whether they reorder some item or not. Predict which dishes will work and which not. Track dish item usage and at what price they get sold out for. Increase the usage selling for an affordable price. As the dish becomes a popular owner can raise the price and label it as the special food(premium). Arrange small events and gathering to host premium price foods to increase the customer’s interest.
Compete with other food brands —
Collect the record of achievements and losses happened in the competitor’s business career. Also have their internal and external SWOT(Strength, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis. Thus you can judge your restaurant’s strength, weakness, opportunities, and threats and plan new strategies accordingly. You can improve your dishes ratings by getting feedbacks from popular brands.
Merging ERP with external data sources —
Data regarding weather, road traffic, and surrounding situations, festive seasons should be collected regularly. Applying prediction algorithms the owner will forecast and will know how much to store in inventory according to the conditions of the day. He would fill the inventory accordingly and order the staff for dish preparations as per the conditions. Thus, the problem of more or less food availability will not occur. No food will get wasted. The owner can save money. He can also forecast about the losses happenings on the certain days. He can dedicate time for planning before something happens. And will be well-prepared to tackle the loss and to make wise decisions in critical conditions. This is the magic of using machine learning techniques because it alerts you the situations likely to happen in the future. Thus that, we can plan accordingly to mitigate the losses.
