Nation’s Restaurant News: How Melting Pot Restaurants Leverage Data

Restaurants are grappling with the challenge of optimizing their data, from extraction to analysis, Nation’s Restaurant News reported. Although there seems to be an infinite amount of data sources available, quality and relevance are just as important. Melting Pot, the 92-unit fondue franchise, has concluded that the most useful data comes from the RFM (recency, frequency and monetary spend) of its customer base, as well as guest survey data.

“Customer segmentation has come a long way,” Melting Pot Vice President of Technology Randy Barnett told NRN. “Nowadays, you can go to these data mining companies and start pitting your data against what they have to really home in on who your customer is … and figure out how to take that bottom 20% of your customer base and get them into the top 50%.

As far as data storage goes, Melting Pot chooses to store it offsite in a data warehouse in order to keep things secure and streamlined. The franchise uses ETL (extract, transform and load) processes to move its data from onsite software to an offsite warehouse.

“We're cognizant that people may want to see the data in different ways and may want to consume it differently,” Barnett said. “Our job is to anticipate those needs and make sure that the experience [of reading the needed data] is seamless.”

Read the full article here.