Boosting restaurant sales is a key objective for every hospitality business, but how can you elevate your restaurant and get it to grow year on year?
With a quality offering and professional customer service, you’re already well on your way. But, there are extra strategies you can take on board that’ll have your restaurant sales soaring. Let’s dive into a few of them here:
Using data to optimise your menu
Without sales data on your menu items, you’re guessing when it comes to menu engineering. Lightspeed Advanced Insights gives you a detailed breakdown of your menu, letting you identify your best and worst-performing dishes. With this clear overview, you can feature your best items more prominently, and also look to improve popular dishes with low profit margins.
This level of insight helps increase restaurant sales, protects the financial health of your business in the long run, and makes sure your customer’s preferences are being taken into account.
Grow with capital
If you’ve got to a point where your restaurant is thriving, you might be looking to expand, and Lightspeed Capital gives you the opportunity to multiply your business on your own terms. Unlike traditional loans, Lightspeed Capital lets you use your cash advance on your own schedule for any business expense, and pay it back as you go, only when you make sales.
Lightspeed customer Dabangg Group* uses Lightspeed Capital to fuel their growth by investing in modern hardware.
“When it comes to opening a restaurant, there are a lot of overhead costs and capital assets we need to inject into the new sites. So, when Lightspeed Capital came in, that helped us maintain the infrastructure and invest in new systems.” said Joju Shibu, Purchasing Manager at Dabangg Group.
“Lightspeed Capital is optimised for the needs of the customers. Lightspeed has a better awareness of the requirements of the hospitality industry compared to other lenders, and caters to our needs.” Joju added.
This flexible funding lets you increase restaurant sales, as you can expand your business and serve more customers, or invest in technology that encourages more customers to visit.
Streamline customer service
A good customer experience is a key determiner of future restaurant sales. Consider how else technology can smooth out restaurant customer service and even increase your average basket size while you’re at it.
For example, mobile order and pay technology lets guests order from your menu by simply scanning a QR code. With a platform like Lightspeed Order Anywhere, you can embed payments software into the platform for faster customer checkout, and let guests create their own profiles with saved payment preferences for more personalised service.
The use of artificial intelligence can also help here. A chatbot acts as a virtual assistant, and interacts with website visitors like a real human, responding with text or voice answers to questions.
Your restaurant website can utilise chatbots to reduce the amount of time you spend manually answering queries and improve customer satisfaction.
As well as answering customer queries, examples of how your restaurant can use a chatbot include letting customers make reservations, check in on the progress of takeaway orders, or suggest menu items they might like to eat. This improved customer service can help boost sales by bettering the overall guest experience.
