Mirus Reporter

What's CX?

According to Wikipedia, Customer Experience (CX) is the product of an interaction between an organization and a customer over the duration of their relationship. This interaction is made up of three parts:

1. The customer's journey.
2. The brand touchpoints the customer interacts with.
3. The environments the customer experiences (including digital environment) during their experience.

In addition to the focus on hiring and retaining staff, labor and food costs, customer engagement technology and winning the guest / customer through exceptional service are among the top priorities for restaurant companies that want to win the wallet and mind of the customer.

What's The Word?!

What on earth is Big Data, a Data Lake and several other mind boggling tech terms you’ll want to be familiar with…

Spreadsheets are giving way to technology designed to deal with the mountains of (Giga, Tera and Peta Bytes) data companies are generating / accessing to gain deeper insights into their businesses and needed to remain competitive.

Whether you’re a seasoned IT professional or just now beginning to consider more advanced reporting tools you’ll want to become familiar with the lingo of the day. I say of the day primarily because new words / phrases are being added at a record pace – just look at Merriam Webster, heck, they added over 1000 new words in 2016 alone. The tech space is no different – did you know, not that long ago, that the definition of Computer was; ‘person who does computations’.

Data Integration

Data integration is best described as a process in which heterogeneous data (marketing, sales, operations, customer, mystery shop, cleanliness, finance, etc.) often referred to as information silos, is extracted, transformed and combined in a data warehouse where it's accessible through a presentation layer that allows it to be used together to form more meaningful and actionable reports.

Theft Happens

We all know that theft happens in the restaurant industry; heck, it happens in most industries. For example, did you know; according to a study by the National Retail Federation, 2016 was the first year ever that 100% of retailers said they were victims of organized retail theft.

Unfortunately there are numerous stats to back up the prevalence of restaurant theft:

Time For Change?

Spreadsheets are one of the most popular tools used to organize data and manage restaurants. Why? Because when you’re starting out spreadsheets are manageable, cost effective and contain useful tools for manipulating data.

Over the past several years however, I’ve seen some pretty incredible spreadsheet usage leaving me dumbstruck by the amount of copying, pasting, calculating and linking of pages that, in turn, create massive multi-page workbooks not to mention the hours of work that goes into their care and feeding. And as a report consumer, if you can locate the information you need in one of these behemoths, it’s likely the information is out of date before you even received it.

In two earlier posts we discussed the Pros and Cons The Benefits Of 3rd Party Restaurant Data Warehousing and in another To SaaS or Not? That's the Question, we outlined where possible cost differences between Do it Yourself (DIY) and 3^rd Party Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions. While I didn’t start with the thought in mind to create a trilogy on DIY I guess I just felt compelled to address the (cost difference) elephant in the room. Therefore, in what could now be considered post # 3 on this topic we’ll add the dollars and cents to see just how much a difference exists between DIY and SaaS solutions.

Are your promos being used to commit fraud?

The majority of restaurants have utilized some type of promotion in order to build revenue, introduce a new product, drive traffic or reward loyal customers. In short, your restaurant business is providing a coupon offer in return for more / specific customer interaction. This give and take process generally works well. However, while it may be increasing traffic and driving sales, your business may be losing hundreds, heck even thousands of dollars due to fraud and you may not even know it.

Buckle up because we’re going to turn on the wayback machine and do some time travel back to a day when companies used mainframe computers. Yes, I said mainframe computers. I guess that says something about how long I’ve been around.

OK, let’s fast forward for a minute and make a quick comparison – mainframes, like many of today’s Do it Yourself (‘DIY’) solutions, aren’t for everyone because they’re expensive to acquire, operate and maintain.

In our first of three labor cost series, we discussed restaurant labor as a percentage and why it's foolish to solely use that method to manage labor cost. In the second part, we reviewed how to control cost using effective labor allocation. In this post we'll discuss restaurant employee productivity.

In our first of three labor cost series, we discussed restaurant labor as a percentage and why it's foolish to solely use that method to manage labor cost. In this article, I'd like to touch on how to control cost using effective labor allocation.