How Lightspeed Advanced Insights delivers restaurant insights

Lightspeed Commerce Inc. has launched Lightspeed Advanced Insights into the EMEA market. The announcement comes a year after the company launched the solution in North America. Advanced Insights is part of the Lightspeed Restaurant solution, the one-stop hospitality ePOS system.

Advanced Insights provides a unique reporting solution that leverages data from guest transactions and restaurant operations. This helps provide restauranteurs with insights about their business and customers.

The solution leverages data from Lightspeed Payments, as well as staff and sales data from the Lightspeed back office solutions. These provide real-time reports about the business.

Liam Crooks, MD for EMEA at Lightspeed, said, “Restaurants are doubling down on technology and automation, and we are continuing to deliver. In pursuit of empowering independent businesses, Lightspeed Advanced Insights offers a powerful solution that will allow restaurateurs to optimise their operations and enter into a new age of managing restaurants. This new product gives owners confidence to make quick decisions they trust to improve their business, by providing analytics that go way deeper than traditional reporting.”

Why choose Lightspeed Advanced Insights

Lightspeed believes that the solution can offer several benefits to restauranteurs. It can help understand customers better, improve planning for staff and supplies and highlight best performing staff. With these insights in hand, restauranteurs can increase revenue and staff satisfaction. The solution can provide these insights immediately via a mobile interface. It can also provide a daily digest for a more considered consumption.

Importantly, the insights can help restaurants engage better with customers. Ensuring they have the right staff at the right time and don’t run out of the most popular dishes. Retention for restaurants is around 30%, with 70% of customers not returning after a single visit.

Getting the right amount of food in to serve customers also helps reduce wastage. This  ensures that customers are fully satisfied and reduce waste. With the Environment Act 2021 coming into force on 1^st October, control over waste is important. In England, macerators are now banned. Across the UK, food waste must be separated from general waste for collection from restaurants. Importantly, the business creating the waste will be responsible for all recycling fees.

Advanced Insights enables the business owner to detect customer trends and react quickly, helping to increase retention. With insights into employee performance, the solution can also help restauranteurs reward good staff. It can help identify the high performers. Enabling restauranteurs to identify champions and mentors to further incentivise those staff and improve those needing further training.

According to Ben Gabbitas, talent and resourcing Director at Valor Hospitality, writing in PeopleManagement, “around 30 per cent of hospitality workers leave in the first 90 days because the job isn’t what they expected, or they didn’t have the right training for the role.” Losing staff can damage a business. There are costs of hiring training, and it is a contributing factor for businesses going into administration. The hospitality industry accounts for 10% of UK administrations. Accountancy firm Price Bailey revealed that 569 restaurant businesses entered insolvency in Q1 2023. And 2,028 businesses went insolvent over the past 12 months. This is a 55% increase from 2011/22, indicating that the economic crisis is biting deeply into the sector.

What is in Lightspeed Advanced Insights

The solution consists of several features. These look at different aspects of the business, providing clear insights for owners to make data-driven changes.

They include:

• Magic Menu Quadrant – Breaks down the popularity of menu items, enabling owners to change menus and identify the classification of different entries, such as:
  • “One-Hit Wonders” are items many people order once, but it doesn’t live up to expectations and is never ordered again
  • “Greatest Hits”. The most popular items
  • “Underperformers”. Items that were ordered infrequently
  • “Hidden Gems”. Items consistently ordered are a staple menu item
• Sales – Sales analytics make understanding day-to-day operations and comparing sales trends easy. Empowered with the actual data behind restaurant operations, it facilitates business decisions regarding staffing locations management and identifies which menu items are bringing people back to the restaurant. This includes hourly heat maps to identify the busiest time of day or week.
• Server Performance – Get an insightful, personalised report card for each server to identify the rockstars, help boost their earnings, and uncover coaching opportunities to confidently make decisions that impact the bottom line.
• Time Optimization: Make data-backed staffing decisions to drive peak efficiency.
• Guest Book Lifts Consumer Lifetime Value: Creating a unique guest profile for everyone who pays with a credit card, Guest Book automatically collects useful data on each guest, such as preferred payment methods, to determine which devices and flows increase ticket size and cover count.
• Campaigns: Define a time range to dynamically track sales and visits compared to the restaurant’s average. Use data to identify how guests respond to new hours, events, promotions, or marketing pushes.
• Daily Digest: Review daily highlights, including daily sales, logbook, shift notes, pay-in and payout, and a summary of server performance.
• Logbook: The Logbook makes it easy for staff to record day shift comments. Customise the questions and checklists to suit your restaurant’s unique operations.

Who can use Lightspeed Advanced Analytics?

Lightspeed Advanced analytics is included as part of Lightspeed Payments and is GDPR compliant. The new solution will be available to customers in EMEA from October 4^th, with more information here. Lightspeed is already used by restaurants across EMEA, including:

• Cubitt House (gastronomic pub restaurant group)
• da Terra (Michelin starred)
• Katsu Ramen and Gyoza
• Mana (Michelin starred)
• Mildred’s & Mallow (casual dining vegan restaurant group)
• Silo (Zero-waste fine dining restaurant)
• The Big Mamma Group (Italian cuisine restaurant group Gloria, Circolo Popolare)
• The JRI Group, including the newly refurbished fine-dining restaurant L’Atelier Joel Robuchon in Mayfair.

Grant Macdonald, Chief Concept Officer, Katsu Ramen & Gyoza, adds, “What kinds of foods drive repeat guests? What kinds of beverages drive, repeat guests? Those pieces of information are incredibly valuable for us. Advanced Insights gives us all kinds of these tools that allow us to dig down into our operation to get ideas, thoughts and insights, really that we might not have had intuitively, but the data shows it to us.”

Enterprise Times: What does this mean

Times are tough for restauranteurs, with COVID, followed by the cost of living crisis. Hospitality needs to look to technology to introduce automation. Importantly, data insights that can help drive decision making to improve revenues and profitability across the business.

Technology is not the solution for restaurants, but it is a means by which they can identify how to improve their business. There are still factors common to any restaurant that will help it. Lightspeed published a blog about the twelve common mistakes that caused restaurants to fail in 2019, and most still hold today.