Benefits of a restaurant CRM - is it really worth it?

And post-visit communications with your customers can yield positive results with 53% of consumers more likely to leave a review of your venue if prompted by email or notification according to data from the Access Hospitality Tech Shift report. 

Post-visit communications can prompt your customers to engage with your business in several ways, with 37% saying they would consider entering a competition, 25% would share details of your restaurant with friends and family and 23% would consider pre-booking their next visit.  

Here at Access Hospitality, we frequently talk to customers who are looking to capitalise on their customer data more effectively but are often asked; “how do I know my marketing activity is helping my business?”. This is a great question as it’s not always possible to attribute visits to specific campaigns. As technology specialists, we work closely with our restaurant customers to help them assess the benefits of restaurant CRM software and how they can monitor the success of their campaigns.  

In this article, we’ll explain what a restaurant CRM is and explore the benefits it can bring to your restaurant to help you fully understand how it can help you and your business in several ways. 

What is a restaurant CRM?

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management and in broad terms is a technology which allows business owners to manage and track customer interactions and data.

A restaurant CRM is one that is specifically designed for restaurants and those running them. Although each software provider’s system will have its unique merits, CRM software designed for restaurants serves as a guest database where a whole host of information about each guest can be held. This helps restaurant operators to better understand their customers and form a broad picture of their needs, so they can tailor marketing messages and provide personalised communication with the aim of drawing customers back through the doors of their restaurants time and time again.

What are the key benefits of a CRM for your restaurant?

Using a CRM for your restaurant not only enables you to hold information about your customers, but when used to its full ability, it can do so much for your business. Such as:

• A centralised place for all your customer data
• Provide a better guest experience
• Improve customer loyalty and bring customers back
• Integration with other business software

Here, we outline these key benefits:

A centralised place for your customer data

To get the most out of a CRM system for your restaurant business you need to gather customer data you can collect data from a range of sources. You can collect data at several touchpoints in your customer’s journey – such as at the time of booking, when making payments or while using a table ordering system or signing into Wi-Fi.  

A CRM enables you to collect and store customer information and marketing permissions in one place, which ultimately makes it easier to access and analyse at a later stage. It can also record more information about customers, such as when their birthdays are if they have known allergens and their food and seating preferences, as well as the dates and times they visit. These finer details all go into building a clearer picture of your guests so you can reach them in the right way with future marketing messages.

Provide a better guest experience

So, a CRM system is going to help you gather customer data but how can you use that data to provide a better guest experience?

CRM software enables you to analyse customer data in terms of demographic and other broad trends, enabling you to tailor your offering according to customer type. If your customer base is mainly made up of singles under 30, for example, you may want a different style of menu and service to a restaurant where the demographic is made up of families.

When you understand your guests on a more personal level, you stand a greater chance of providing them with a more relevant offering that will draw them back to your venue. You can identify and target customers based on several definable traits – such as what day of the week they usually visit if they have used a voucher previously, if they are vegetarian or if they have booked online for special events and you can then send tailored offers, money off opportunities, new menu items and event information accordingly.

Everyone loves feeling special and because data gives your team an insight into who your diners are, and what they like, the chance of them feeling this way will increase.

Improves customer loyalty and brings customers back

Did you know that on average 70% of a restaurant’s database consists of customers who have only visited once?  

With so much competition out there, your customers can be easily swayed to visit other venues even if they really enjoyed their visit to your restaurant, so it’s important to stay at the forefront of your customer’s minds long before they want to book a table.  

With a CRM system in place, you can set up automated campaigns that send out messages at one month, 3 months, 6 months or however long you choose, after their last visit. Or you can create customer touchpoints where you send them useful or valuable information – such as new menu items, a voucher on their birthday or discounts off their next visit.  

You’ll also be able to track performance data across all your marketing campaigns so you can see how many customers opened or clicked on your message and determine what marketing messages resonate with your customers.   

Integration with your restaurant EPoS

Effective CRM software will help you maximise your marketing opportunity by growing your customer database and harvesting as much customer data as possible through integrations with your other business software.  

A CRM system integrated with your restaurant’s EPoS helps you gain deeper insights into your customers’ behaviour and inform your marketing activity by identifying your optimum target audience for your campaigns.  

With a view of the order history of your guests through your EPoS integration, you can personalise and tailor offers, discounts and messaging to deliver more relevant communications.  

Your detailed sales data will also help you to monitor the success of your marketing activity by being able to track which customers return to your venue after receiving marketing communications.  

When doesn’t a restaurant need a CRM?

There are two main factors that might mean that your restaurant doesn’t need a CRM at all:

• Ongoing cost
• Time commitment

Firstly, a CRM can be a high business expense with a monthly cost to consider and while this high cost is usually indicative of a huge range of functionality, the cost can be prohibitive for smaller or new businesses and it’s worth considering the ROI before you commit a large amount of your budget. For restaurant, bar, and pub operators who find cost a factor, you may be able to utilise more cost-effective tools depending on your goals, for example, using a free or cheap email platform to start sending out marketing campaigns to customer lists that you maintain yourself. The downside to this is that it is more time intensive and harder to do well if you’re not a marketing expert!

Secondly, while your CRM will save hours in manual data entry and building customer lists – you do need someone to be able to segment audiences and create marketing communications. In a multi-site business operation, this would usually be handled by the marketing team, but for smaller operators who don’t have this kind of resource they need to factor in the time for someone to analyse the customer data and build campaigns. Utilising a CRM to invest in customer retention over customer acquisition is a solid business strategy, but only if you can commit the time as well as the money to invest in it.

How Acteol CRM can help your restaurant

Our own CRM solution encompasses all these business benefits, tracking and recording every guest interaction to create a powerful single-customer view.

A single customer view combines all your customer data automatically, tracking every restaurant visit and customer interaction with your business – from the point of booking, to order details and post-visit feedback. Enabling restaurant operators to deliver more relevant and engaging marketing communications generates more repeat visits and increases sales.

As well as providing greater insight into your customers, Acteol has a number of features that can help your restaurant build relationships with customers in the following ways:

• Campaign creation – A Campaign module enables you to create all forms of communication – from email marketing to push notifications from one place, saving time and effort and encouraging repeat visits.
• Collect feedback – A Feedback module ensures customer feedback from multiple sources is placed in front of the right people who can respond swiftly. Data can also be updated to encompass the feedback and ensure it is used to inform and steer further communications and visits.
• Boost return visits – There is an option to create a loyalty programme giving guests points for visits and enabling them to spend the points during a return visit. Another module can create voucher codes to incentivise future visits.
• Deepens insight – Integration with Google Maps provides key data for each restaurant location so operators can understand the population, market penetration, and demographics in a local area The SCV also includes a set of interactive Insights reports enabling you to see key information such as database growth, demographic segment and visit and spend behaviour at a glance.

Acteol’s single customer view and range of features are designed to make CRM work in an efficient and highly effective way for restaurant operators without having to manually extract customer lists and data.

It is a one-stop shop for customer relationship management which helps you:

• Connect – bringing together data in one place
• Segment – identify the ways to reach different customers
• Engage – creating targeted and personalised communication
• Measure - give deeper insight through ongoing analysis.

Find out how restaurant CRM software can help you manage your customer data by downloading our brochure, or get in touch with one of our team to talk through your requirements.