OREANDA-NEWS. October 02, 2015. Restaurant marketers recently convened for a webinar  about “Reaching for Restaurant Bliss”. The aim was for ways for restaurants to leverage the wealth of their in-house POS data for Customer Engagement marketing activities and enterprise-wide decisions. Equifax can help clients take advantage of their internal data, enhanced with economic data, to create a more comprehensive view of guests and inform better decision-making.

Here are some of the key takeaways:

Gain a more comprehensive view of your guests – While restaurants have a high volume of anonymous purchase data in their POS systems, and possibly some loyalty and survey data, it is typically not tied together in a manner that illuminates more about the guests in an actionable way. Having siloed or anonymous data does not help a restaurant to get a better understanding of its most-profitable guests, their preferences or their estimated financial capacity. In addition, enterprise decisions are frequently made without an additional layer of data that could provide key insights and input.

Tie your data to third-party data to augment and enhance your guest insights – While anonymized, or tokenized, POS data is helpful to understand sales, menu item popularity or server performance, this data becomes even more powerful when matched with consumer economic data. It is possible to match anonymous POS data with actual consumer and household information in a secure environment, enhance it with relevant marketing insights and then return anonymized data to the restaurant. This provides actionable guest information that can serve as input to pictures of high-potential guests and help structure more effective marketing campaigns.

Make this consolidated insight available across the enterprise – With a better picture of the ideal guest, their spending habits, trade area performance, and results of marketing promotions, it is possible to address additional enterprise-level questions. Now your data can better help answer questions about:

  • Personas of ideal guests and prospects
  • Enhanced trade area sizing and performance
  • Input for decisions on new locations
  • Under- or over-performing stores
  • Estimated share of wallet in any market and discretionary spend capacity of your guests
  • Additional ways to better reach high-potential guests

This enhanced view of your guests, using the wealth of your POS data as a foundation, can help you improve profitable guest relationships and help increase their lifetime value. In addition, operational efficiencies can be improved and new consumer demand identified.