7 Restaurant CRM Systems to Augment Your Bottom Line
Last update: 24 November 2023 at 11:50 am
3.00/5The boundaries of a stellar restaurant experience stretch beyond just what happens at the table.
And when it comes to your restaurant business, the sole focus on maximizing profits cannot guarantee success. Cultivating relationships with people is essential in a restaurant business.
The philosophy behind this statement is simple – Acquiring new customers is 6-7x more expensive than retaining the existing ones.
Hence you need to benefit from repeat visits and referrals. This can happen only with strong emphasis on maintaining customer relationships.
Technology – A Catalyst for Customer Relationship Goals
In cultivating such long-term relationships, it is evident that apart from the restaurant table services, a company needs to focus on customers’ minds even after the dining experience is over and also make an effort to register customers’ preferences and behavior.
Connecting with customers beyond restaurant public relations requires a system that can help the restaurant serve the dining customers in the best way possible and also serve them post the dining experience so they can find themselves in your restaurant again.
CRM (customer relationship management) software helps restaurants overcome all the challenges and advance to new heights.
What Is a CRM System?
CRM is an abbreviation of customer relationship management, and the name gives away what the platform is about. A CRM helps businesses to optimize and prioritize to retain customers and accomplish business growth by improving the customer experience.
It’s a software solution that uses different targeted marketing campaigns, strategies, practices, and technology. They blend together to help companies analyze and organize all aspects of the customer experience.
Customer relationship management or customer relationship data has found its importance in various business-to-consumer companies. A functional CRM for restaurants deploys targeted marketing campaigns and helps from a retention and revenue point of view.
What Does a CRM System Look Like in the Restaurant Industry?
Since we have already dived into the concept of CRM for restaurants, let’s understand why it is so important in the food and beverage industry.
With all the technology surrounding us, consumer and restaurant relationships are evolving daily. Restaurant customer relationship management is a way to understand customers by collecting and analyzing their data.
It helps restaurant owners connect with the customers and create an experience to establish a long-term relationship with them. It also organizes sales activities like direct and indirect marketing leads and social media marketing.
With so much heavy lifting a CRM system does in handling dynamics, if we could strategize some of them, it guarantees positive results within two to three months.
The CRM for restaurants utilizes the below information to deliver amazing traction in lead generation:
- Email address and mobile numbers
- Preferences and history of orders
- Anniversaries and Birthdays
- Dietary restrictions
Looking |
Discover the most relevant agencies for your project based on your own specific requirements.
Find an agency!Which Are the Top 7 Restaurant CRM Systems?
1 – Salesforce
Salesforce is a popular American cloud-based software company. It is a famous hotel and restaurant industry CRM software that provides a CRM system across Windows and Macintosh platforms.
It allows businesses to use their cloud technology with CRM tools for support, sales, and marketing worldwide to connect and enhance the experience with customers, potential customers, and business partners.
Benefits
- Setting up a customized dashboard
Once you have selected a software solution, you must not go through the trouble of manually importing data from a different system without any link to its complete picture. This would make it difficult to derive insights and present the information graphically. The tool solves this complex issue.
Salesforce equips you with a customized dashboard solution highlighting specific metrics important for workflow.
- Optimized processes
All the systems across the CRM platforms are automated, which helps to reduce the time to email and generate leads in a marketing campaign. Since the processes are automated, it is easier to maintain consistency in customer-centric interactions across sales and marketing with this CRM system.
2 – Oracle NetSuite CRM
Oracle NetSuite CRM is a CRM software solution that helps in the hotel and restaurant industry’s accounting, asset management, customer management, and audit trail. It is the perfect CRM for all your organization’s needs and provides great help to the sales and marketing teams.
The Oracle NetSuite CRM is an all-in-one cloud platform that is android and iOS friendly. It is compatible with popular platforms like Windows and Macintosh.
Benefits
- Single data source
In a single view of customer data, one can access information regarding the customer across all the data input sources, providing complete visibility into all online, in-store, and phone transactions.
- Improved sales performance
Get all your ducks in a row with the NetSuite CRM and streamline all the sales processes with a single cash and fulfillment solution.
- Easy integration
While used as a centralized system for finance-related work, it can be integrated with a wide bandwidth of software designed for other departments.
3 – Zoho CRM
Zoho CRM from Zoho is a cloud-based customer relationship management software solution. The integrated restaurant CRM provides sales, marketing, and customer support services for business-to-business and business-to-consumer companies.
This CRM system is used in many industries but has made a phenomenal impact on the restaurant and QSR industry. It is available in a wide range of languages and is best suitable for freelancers, Startups, and SMEs in the food and restaurant industry.
Benefits
- Reports, Insights, and analytics
Depending on your business goals, customize and create dashboards, charts, funnels, and target meters, it monitors your sales cycle effectively, and work it out by saving time and costs. The Zoho CRM has all the data open in a single window. This makes it one of the few restaurant CRM solutions that can provide an in-depth analysis of your business to retain customers and increase revenue.
- AI to power sales
Isn’t Siri wonderful? Well, so is ‘Zia,’ Zoho’s AI, which is used to manage sales goals more efficiently and in an automated fashion. She is a virtual colleague who can accurately envision the outcome of sales activities and gather and summarize the information you need. It can also help maintain consistency in communication with potential customers and lead them to choose you.
4 – Freshsales
Freshsales is a robust yet easy-to-use cloud-based software solution from Freshworks, India. It provides a customer relationship management solution that helps different industry verticals to study, manage and evolve their interactions with existing and potential customers.
It is best suited for the hotel and restaurant industry as it gives everything to businesses to manage customers with workflow automation in a hassle-free package.
Benefits
- Increase upselling and cross-sell at the right time
With all the data in one place and visibility of all the customers’ websites and in-app activities across any platform, you can understand which customers are interested in consuming more of your products.
- Boost customer satisfaction
Since the Freshasales CRM software helps in aligning your teams, reducing response time, consistently engaging customers, and continuously offering them the best deals, there’s no reason why customers will not have an amazing experience with you.
5 – Leadforce CRM
Leadforce CRM software can eliminate the tedious work and use smart and modern-day CRM techniques to engage more potential customers. Optimizing tasks enables more time and in-depth insights to sell faster.
Leverage the tool to deliver a deeply personalized experience to existing customers and prospects.
With pipeline management, dashboard, and reports organizing sales and creating a long-term relationship with the customers, Leadforce CRM aces the game.
Benefits
- Drives sales
Monitor sales activities, engage customers by studying their activities online and on the app, and move leads faster through the sales funnel.
- Target leads better
It manages the relationship with the customers across various platforms and gets targeted leads from various sources like web forms, emails, and social media.
- Customize and Acquire
With the Leadforce CRM software, acquire a complete overview of customers’ interactions by analyzing their order history and choices with customized reports and single-point data access.
6 – Thryv
Thryv is a small business management platform that powers up customer relationship management with its custom and practical software solutions. It provides you with tools that are best suitable for startups and SMEs in the hotel and restaurant industry.
Its key features include analytics, coupons, contact management, and scheduling. Experience the intuitiveness and proficiency of Thryvs’ software solution in its free trial period and then decide.
Benefits
- Centralize day-to-day business
It is an all-in-one customer management software designed to help centralize all day-to-day communications for better running of the business. It will not only help in minimizing operational costs but also help to enhance the quality of services.
- Level playing field
The greatest challenge faced by small businesses is facing stiff competition from well-established businesses. CRM increases the visibility of the company and helps build brand awareness. It also provides in-depth analysis that enables small businesses to learn about competitors.
7 – SugarCRM
SugarCRM is the world’s largest cloud-based open-source CRM software. Since it is open source, its code is available to any product user, developer, or customer. A company, with the help of a developer, can build upon it with ease according to its requirements.
The Sugar solution delivers simplicity, power, and flexibility for managing opportunities, leads, cases, activities, contacts, and accounts. Sugar is the ideal solution for small to medium-sized businesses across all industries.
Benefits
- Unmatched services
The tool facilitates a more well-rounded customer view. This enables the sales, marketing, and customer service teams to deploy a result-oriented engagement strategy. The end outcome is successful customer retention.
- Customer empathy at its best
SugarCRM helps you in creating a conversation about your brand with your customers. This tool can help you effectively assuage your customers’ doubts and misgivings by automatically intimating them about discounts, renewals, incentives, coupons, and offers.
Example of a Restaurant CRM Strategy
Let’s explore the finer points of a restaurant CRM strategy from two broad angles – Customer data and marketing campaigns
1 – Customer data
The most important part of the food and beverage industry is the people. Keeping track of potential and existing customers becomes crucial as without knowing customers, there is a very limited scope left for the evolution and advancement of the business.
If a business wants to achieve big in the food and beverage industry, it must look forward to having long-term relationships with the customers. It helps in building brand awareness and a sense of trust among the public.
A business can easily keep track of customers by integrating CRM software that can generate reports and increase restaurant sales. These in-depth reports allow a company to decide on the most popular food item, the highest profit-making item, preferences, and customer behavior. This data can help adopt better strategies to drive maximum sales and create a joyful experience for people.
CRM software can revolutionize how you engage with customers by keeping track of their birth dates and anniversary dates and sending them greetings or offers based on their preferences.
2 – Marketing Campaigns
Once we are equipped with the data of our existing customers, we can foster a connection with the customers post-purchase by making your offers visible to them across various platforms and keeping them up to date with everything that the brand does, and this can happen through marketing integrated into a CRM software.
Email marketing
Email marketing is the most effective method of establishing a relationship with existing customers. CRM software can help you be consistent with your emails of offers, discounts, and current promotions at your restaurant business. Since the company has data on the customer’s behavior and preferences, it can personalize the emails.
SMS marketing
One of the advantages of CRN software in sales and marketing is its continuation in sales activities. After Covid-19, most of the time, people are buried on their mobile screens. With data regarding customers’ mobile numbers, we can send them SMS informing them about the present deals, limited-time deals and combo offers, or any other promotions. It has a high chance of being viewed as SMS messages have a high visibility rate compared to others.
Social media marketing
The business can use whatsapp to send messages on smartphones as it will have a higher visibility rate than SMS.
Restaurant social media marketing involves exuding all the ranges of creativity to devour customers’ attention by putting across delicious mouth-watering items or different, funny, informative, and crisp content to create buzz around the brand.
Wrapping It Up
A good restaurant experience is cherished and talked about among friends and family. A restaurant CRM system helps businesses to deliver such experiences to customers and increase brand awareness.
An efficient CRM system widens the scope of evolution of a business. It helps it scale to newer heights by adopting a different plan of action and organizing services by studying in-depth reports.
A restaurant business can use a restaurant CRM system to show all their customers that their emotions are valued and cared for and generate a sense of trust among the customers regarding the quality, relationship, and services offered by the company.
