How to Apply Analytics to Your Hospitality Venue

These days, there are so many terms, such as predictive analytics, hospitality analytics, big data, customer metrics, consumer analytics and more. But these can often leave people confused and overwhelmed.

In previous blog posts, we’ve discussed the many benefits Impos Analytics can bring to your business, from providing you with a visual dashboard to helping you make better-informed decisions about your hospitality venue.

We’ve also written about how our Analytics works, emphasising the ability to stay on top of your numbers via multiple devices, that it’s suitable for all venue types and heavily customisable.

In this post, we look at some of the great ways you can actually use your data to help your hospitality venue succeed. Here are a few examples:

POS Analytic

Work out your most popular, and least popular, items using effective hospitality tools.

Sales Breakdowns

With Impos Analytics, you can slice and dice your raw data into custom reports in minutes, and set them up so you can visualise them just how you want them.

Either way, you’ll gain valuable information about your breakdown of sales, such as what your most popular café or restaurant items are by category or timeframe, a breakdown of your revenue, an hourly performance of sales each day or spend per head by sitting.

Your sales breakdown figures can uncover all manner of insights, such as spotting low performing items on the menu, monitoring how marketing campaigns are performing, busy times of day to help you work out when to have extra staff on-hand (or when to reduce hours) and to better optimise your inventory.

POS analytics is an effective way to improve your inventory/stock taking [Picture: Local Taphouse]

Staff Breakdowns

Keeping track of your staff’s performance is another important aspect in hospitality, and Impos’ analytics can track each staff member’s sales figures.

This information can help you roster more effectively by, say, promoting your best members of staff to the busiest shifts or simply to work out who’s best at upselling the specials, dessert or certain drinks.

External Predictive Analytics

But it’s not just your data that’s valuable. There’s a wealth of external data out there, ready to be mined to great effect.

One oft-quoted example is US economy hotel chain Red Roof Inn; they used readily-accessible weather forecasts and flight data to predict roughly how many people might face flight cancellations.

Based on the results, Red Roof Inn then targeted mobile phone users in the areas they predicted were most likely to be affected by inclement weather. In the designated areas, the hotel chain saw a significant increase in business.

Another way to utilise big data is to optimise pricing through more accurate analyses and predictions based on market demand signals, local supply, and an understanding of the customer’s willingness to pay.

A simple example of this would be to pull all the prices of main meals or cocktails or coffees (depending on your hospitality venue type) within a 2km radius and to calculate median prices, weigh up outliers and alter either your costings or prices accordingly.

Impos Analytics is available on multiple devices, such as smartphones, allowing you easy access anytime, anywhere [Picture: Auction Rooms]

A key takeaway is that analytics should not be seen as time or resource intensive. Collecting and filtering customer feedback, whether in your venue, an internet review or any other medium, is a type of analytics. And by proactively evaluating common themes from said feedback, you’ll find trends emerging you can seek to change or bolster.

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No matter how savvy or analytical you are at the moment, taking the time to decipher key stats and figures can give you a huge competitive advantage over the competition. Download our Impos Analytics guide for more details.

If your venue already has an Impos POS system already, make sure you’re integrated with our powerful Impos Analytics tool to stay one step ahead. If you’re not with Impos, get in touch and have a friendly chat about our POS products and our analytics integration.