How much do you rely on your CRM?

Let’s dive first into the meaning and the purpose of a CRM.

Oxford Lexico defines CRM as customer relationship management, denoting strategies and software that enable a company to organize and optimize its customer relations.

In our restaurant world, a CRM provides a skeletal data and software system to collect, track, and help us analyze our customers and manage communication channels between us.

Interesting patterns have emerged around self-pickup and contactless delivery during the recent pandemic, with technology adoption helping enhance customer experiences, maximizing operational efficiency and tapping new revenue streams. In the midst of this change, we can keep new restaurant experiences from becoming overwhelming and impersonal by controlling the data.

Traditional CRM systems for restaurants have independently collected decades of data which regularly remains inaccessible, not merged, and under-utilized. For example,

• We have customers that fill out contact webforms on our website.
• We have customers that sign-up for our email lists.
• We have customers that order delivery, either through our website’s 3rd party app or straight through Grubhub, DoorDash, or Uber Eats.
• We have customers that pay via credit cards at our restaurant through the POS.

We struggle to maintain a common database from these various data sources continues to be an understatement. Just think of:

• The powerful database we could produce from these datasets from around the enterprise.
• The analysis we could perform on this combined data.
• The predictions we could make on a customer from their purchase history.
• The inventory cost savings we could generate from overall historical customer purchases.
• The communication channels we could open with our customers that are driven by intelligent data activities.

Technology adoption to answer these “just think of” situations often present challenges: high upfront costs, difficulty in integration and lack of scalability, fear of losing the attention and warmth of personal interaction. But not here. Not with us. We can make these challenges must easier to absorb. Consistent, accessible, accurate data powering friendly reports and easy-to-implement recommendations turn challenges into actions that benefit every customer.

So, back to our original thought — How much do you rely on your CRM? Let’s talk to make sure you fully understand a CRM’s power and capability to help grow your business.

* photo courtesy of Marcelo Colmenero @ Burst