How to Use Data to Optimize Your Delivery Offering

In the current climate, data is one of the most vital tools a restaurateur has in their arsenal. Data is integral for getting a rounded view of your business and making the right strategic decisions. Having the right data allows you to plan, shift priorities, and make changes on the fly based on cold, hard proof of your sales numbers. 

Consulting your data allows you to optimize your business for the current situation—whether a nationwide lockdown or a ‘new normal’—and keeping track of demand from each channel is especially important nowadays.

Knowing what is most popular on each channel and when can simplify everything from staffing to food prepping. This is particularly true when you offer eat-in, takeaway, and multiple delivery options, as it can be tough to know where to prioritize. 

When it comes to delivery, your priority will be this: making sure that your delivery sales get input into your POS as the tailwinds and not waiting until the end of the day to send them all through at once.

Here's where Deliverect Restaurants comes in, integrating with both the delivery platforms and your point of sale to give you the most accurate data possible so you can analyze accurate data going in, and you can analyze it using Tenzo. Tenzo allows you to see your restaurant’s whole ecosystem. You can start changing your efforts and evolving, knowing each change's effect on your business. 

Start simple: streamline your menu 

The first thing you should consider is streamlining your delivery menu. Customers have to decide when choosing a restaurant to order from. If you have an enormous list of options available, customers will likely experience decision fatigue and leave your page without making a purchase. 

preparationforLooking at past sales data, determine your best-selling items and double down on them. A simplified menu will also make it easier on your team and shorten the turnaround time between a customer making an order and receiving it, leading to a better experience and positive reviews. Plus, it allows you to reduce your inventory and waste costs. 

Also, though it sounds obvious, don’t forget to consider transportability when revising your menu. Your avocado toast with poached eggs may sell well, but if the poached eggs are scrambled by the end of the journey, your customers will be disappointed. Ensure that everything you deliver can withstand half an hour on the back of a fast-moving motorcycle or bicycle, dodging through traffic and hitting the occasional pothole. 

Step 2: Explore your channel demand 

As mentioned above, knowing when your orders are coming in and where they’re coming from is incredibly useful. Using Deliverect Restaurants and Tenzo together, you can analyze how your different revenue sales differ in spending and timing. You might find that you get your eat-in clients between 12 and 2, but your busiest delivery window is between 10:45 and 12:45. If you know the timings and the most popular dishes for each channel, you can prep far more efficiently. You can turn this data into visuals for a better representation in the form of graphs. For this, consider using a professional graph maker, making the process much easier.

Knowing the most popular channels and when can also improve your staffing efficiency. If the majority of your orders will come from delivery, having multiple front-of-house staff may be unnecessary, but you might need extra hands in the kitchen.

Furthermore, this forecasting can also help you know when you’ll have an influx of delivery drivers streaming in and out of your premises. You can then be prepared to do a bit of air traffic control to avoid the pandemonium of a full restaurant and a crowd of helmeted delivery drivers and keep everyone safely distanced.  

Step 3: Own the full-day share 

The fantastic thing about delivery platforms and brands is that you can be everything to everyone. A fully dine-in restaurant can only serve its specific cuisine (i.e., if you’re a Chinese restaurant, customers will come to you for Chinese food). However, you can simultaneously be a pizza chain, a Chinese restaurant, and a fish and chips shop, thanks to delivery. 

What I’m referring to are virtual brands. By tracking your most popular dishes by the time of day, you may realize that customers want different types of food throughout the day. So why not cater to them? Customers may feel like ordering a smoothie bowl for breakfast, a salad for lunch, and a pizza for dinner but are unlikely to order them from the same brand. Multiple brands on marketplaces increase your customer base at any given time, hence owning the full-day share. 

Virtual brands have gotten bigger and bigger, with many cloud or dark kitchens set up around major cities to cater to wider audiences. But you don’t need to be in a massive warehouse to make this work. Any commercial kitchen can create food for more than one brand, especially if the food types are preferred at different times. 

Virtual brands have the added bonus of costing far less than traditional restaurants to set up. You don’t need to find a new location—you can use your existing kitchen. You don’t need to outfit a restaurant, as the brand exists online. You can share inventory across multiple brands, using up what you might not always get through in your traditional restaurant. 

Conclusion 

By accurately tracking and forecasting sales data, you can better cater to your customers, reducing delivery time and giving them more options than they want. It also allows you to staff the appropriate level in front and back of the house based on channel popularity and time.

Then, to complete the circle, you can order and prep precisely what you need, reducing your food waste along the way. You can also spot geographical trends and better understand your customers' expectations by tracking across all locations. 

Check out how Tenzo gives you a better view of your business with advanced analytics and AI forecasting.