Having a Client Relationship Management (CRM) system for your restaurant can make a world of a difference in how your business grows. Having a restaurant CRM system can help you build strong relationships with your best customers and successfully implement marketing strategies.

What is a Restaurant CRM System?

CRM helps restaurants connect with their customers more by collecting relevant data about their guests. This data is then used to create a custom-tailored dining experience for each guest.

Data collection is usually done when a customer does online and phone reservations. The data gathered can be as basic as the name and contact number of the guests, and could be more in-depth such as the number of visits, food and seating preferences, allergies, birthdays, and anniversaries.

This allows you to understand your customers. When they know you have taken the time to give them a personalized experience, they feel more appreciative and perhaps this builds a stronger loyalty to your restaurant.

Your restaurant may not have a CRM system currently but the essence of it may already be present in your operations. Your front-of-house staff knows who your regular customers are and can easily give them a personalized experience. But that knowledge is only limited to the staff’s individual knowledge.

Having a CRM system allows for that knowledge to be shared with all the staff of the restaurant. This then allows management, front-of-house staff, and even the cooks in the back, to make strategic decisions to improve the guest experience as well as restaurant performance.

How to Boost Business Using Restaurant CRM

1. Loyalty programs and rewards

With the help of CRM, you can build a loyalty program for your customers.

You can track how many visits a guest makes, how much they spend per visit and their usual orders. You can also include important dates like birthdays or anniversaries and give them a surprise as a way to say thank you for their loyalty.

Having loyalty programs and rewards will make your customers want to keep on coming back because of the great customer service they have in every dining experience. This will improve customer satisfaction as well as increase retention.

2. Improved in-service guest experience

Another way to boost customer satisfaction using CRM is to improve the in-service customer experience.

This could look like recommending wine based on past references or getting started with their usual entree order. Using the data you gathered from them through your loyalty program, you add a candle to their dessert order when it’s their birthday. You can also make sure that their allergies or dietary restrictions are well noted in their orders.

It could even be more subtle touches like seating guests at their favorite table or favorite server. Maybe they prefer to be in a chillier spot in the restaurant or prefer to sit next to the live performer.

These small details noted in the CRM system can make it easier for your front-of-house team to give your guests a great dining experience.

3. Optimized marketing strategies

When implementing marketing strategies, especially online, you want to be as effective and efficient as possible. You can boost your business with Instagram or Facebook by segmenting your customer base to create more targeted campaigns. The same is possible through CRM.

You can reach out to your customers using their preferred communication method whether it’s through SMS, email, or push notifications. You can also create a more personalized messaging approach depending on the data you’ve gathered from their past visits.

For example, you can reach out to guests who have booked private parties the last holiday season with a special offer for their next reservation. Guests who order from your craft beer menu are invited to an Octoberfest event. You can announce a new allergy-friendly menu for your guests with dietary restrictions.

For any event or concept you have for your restaurant, you can effectively boost customer awareness for it by targeting the right people through the data you’ve gathered from your CRM.

4. Better restaurant performance analysis

Being able to look back at your restaurant’s performance and implementing ways to improve is an essential part of running a business. If you want to increase restaurant revenue, you need to find ways to improve your food and your service.

With the help of CRM, you can figure out what the most and the least ordered items are on your menu. You can then adjust and be more economical with your produce orders.

You can also find out the most and least popular day or night of the week or when you’re the busiest. This will help make scheduling your staff easier.

All the insight you can gather from your CRM data can help you make more informed decisions about how you can best run your restaurant moving forward.

Effective CRM implementation can lead to significant growth for your business. With customers being the backbone of all businesses, especially a restaurant, how you interact and attend to them is how you drive more business.

By being more in tune with your customers through the data gathered from your CRM system, you can build lasting connections with them that can carry your restaurant a long way.