How do you use analytics to make F&B decisions?

To effectively integrate and leverage analytics in F&B, start by defining the metrics that matter. Not all your goals need to directly drive business, but they should be measuring the vital metrics of each department of the F&B concept that have the largest impact on the business. For example, for kitchen teams, this may be waiting times and quality control rates. For marketing, this may be reservation form submissions via social media or branded search lift.

An important thing is to always involve the business owner in your analytics and show them the business impact of analytics. Many analytics folks tend to get excited at defining goals and creating reports that they forget to check with the business owners. Hence they may run the risk of producing analytics with low usage. It's essential to ensure high usage of your analytics by heavily involving your business user at step 1. Let them tell you their business struggles. Do they think measuring the KPIs will help their business? If so, in what ways? How much profit/revenue will the analytics bring in? Putting a number to it will motivate the business owner to share input into analytics and follow along in the process.

Agree to start analyzing everything from the customers, especially you are a customer centric company, regardless of what industry you are in. Ideally in analytics, you should be able to produce a full funnel view of all your customers (assuming everything is trackable), starting from point of entry to retention to exit. You can then simplify this by segmenting your customers into different personas for ease of understanding and targeting. Analytics can happen at any given point in the funnel to find out what is happening and why. Different strategies can be applied at different points in the funnel to increase customer acquisition (start of funnel), customer satisfaction (middle/end of funnel) and customer retention (end of funnel).

To make your report useful, you should always compare your data to a benchmark. This can be industry average/competitor data. Most business leaders often look at numbers and ask so what? What are we going to do? Analytics folks always have to strive one step forward by providing not only numbers in a report, but insights/stories/context. This can be done by always including a benchmark/context in every report being produced. For example, our daily sales on chicken wings yesterday was up by 300%. Looking at the benchmark (e.g. industry average), it was up by 350%. Turns out yesterday was Super Bowl. That means although our wings sales was up 300%, it was faring worse than industry average. The next step naturally would be to find out why.

There are a lot that can be found in quantitative data. However, one thing in F&B industry is that a lot of sales are actually driven by word of mouth, esp. in restaurants. Therefore, efforts have to be made to track performance through qualitative data e.g. in-depth interviews, yelp reviews, etc. These can be valuable context to supplement quantitative data analytics