How to increase the efficiency of your leisure or entertainment business

Increasing efficiency should be a key focus for all businesses in the leisure and entertainment industry. Making your business more efficient will lead to a few key benefits, ultimately creating a more successful business for you:

• Less time spent on administration
• Reduced overheads
• Increased productivity
• Happier staff
• Most importantly, a bigger profit!

Let’s break down how each of these can be achieved, and impact your business.

Less time spent on administration

There are so many tedious administrative tasks that take up the time of you and your staff in your business, such as updating customer information, creating marketing emails, accountancy and finance administration and so much more – we’re sure you have your own long list!

However, what if you could get that time back?

How much more productive could you, or your employees be?

That’s the beauty of automation, it takes care of the time consuming admin so you don’t have to. For example, let’s look at a few examples of automation you could use in your business:

CRM Administration – Let’s consider if you have a CRM of thousands of contacts, each time they need to update details, like address or contact number they call you up or send an email – that could quite quickly become a big piece of admin each month.

In this instance, creating a member or account login as part of your web ecosystem would allow your customers to login and update their details themselves, with an intertwined system immediately updating these details in your CRM, ensuring your business has the most up to date details for marketing.

Marketing – Whilst some marketing messages will of course need to be custom written for the occasion, you can absolutely set up some key marketing emails to be sent via automation, for example:

• • Send automated birthday emails with promotional offers.
  • Hit guests with limited time promotions after they visit your venue, boosting revisitation rate.
  • Drip campaigns with targeted content and incentives.
  • Get reviews – we know how important reviews can be for marketing your business.

The list is endless when it comes to how automation can boost your marketing, freeing up your marketing team to spend more time on other key marketing initiatives that can’t be automated.

Finance – Let’s say you use Quickbooks for your accounting, if you send a customer an invoice for a large party booking, once they pay the invoice you ideally want that transaction information to sync with Quickbooks and your booking and management solution, ensuring all figures are correct across your key platforms – otherwise that’s a lot of data entry for staff to do! This can be automated, ensuring data across all of your platforms is correct and freeing up time for staff.

Hopefully this demonstrates how automation can help reduce administration time required across just a couple of your business units.

Self service

The COVID-19 Pandemic pretty much revived the QR Code from its deathbed – it’s hard to find a bar or restaurant not using QR Code scanning for table service these days.

And why wouldn’t they?

It makes lives easier for customers, they can order when they’re ready, stay seated and customise their order in the same way as if they were placing the order through a staff member.

This also represents a great chance to upsell by adding additional extras throughout the user journey – in fact, we’ve seen some customers boost order value by over 20% thanks to the easier ability to upsell and cross sell.

So whilst self service can add to your revenue this way, it can also help you when it comes to reducing overheads – if you don’t need staff taking orders, you can reduce the number of staff required per shift, or put staff in other areas of the business where required.

Ultimately implementing a self service solution will leave you with happier guests, the potential for more sales and lower costs of operations – what’s not to like?

Use task management software

Going back and forth on email and confirming details can be a real time consuming task for people throughout a business – which is why we’d recommend implementing a task management solution for your business.

A task management software for designated teams can help everyone work together more efficiently, track progress, and stay on task. This allows tasks to be assigned to people throughout your business, ensuring tasks are done and tracked – with BookNow, this can be done natively through Salesforce, or additional solutions such as Trello or Monday can be used.

With clear tasks and deadlines implemented by your chosen software, you could see huge improvements to business efficiency – still not convinced? Take a look at these stats:

• Every year, poor communication costs small businesses with under 100 employees $420,000.
• Project management software saves the average employee 498 hours per year.
• 80% of employees spend half of their workweek on “rework” caused by poor communication.

With some of the figures quoted there, can you afford to not utilise task management software?

Maintain high employee morale

Finally, we wanted to finish off on a more human element when it comes to how you can increase your business efficiency – building and maintaining a high employee morale. 

It’s pretty obvious that when employees feel valued and appreciated, they’re far more likely to work harder and ensure they’re more efficient in their role. So how can you keep employee morale high?

Highlight great performance to the team, recognise when your team are working hard

• Introduce a bonus scheme for when KPIs are hit.
• Introduce an employee of the month award, with an incentive awarded such as a gift voucher or additional day for holiday allowance. 
• As a business owner, or senior member of staff you often set the tone for your business, through middle management down to part time staff. Create an environment you would want to work in, and you’ll see results throughout your workforce.

You can have the best software and product offering in the world, but if your staff morale is low you’re going to struggle to operate a successful and efficient business!

We hope this gives you some ideas in how you can make your business run more efficiently and ultimately lead to a more profitable business for you. To get an idea of how BookNow Software can help support your business, get in touch with us via the form below and we can follow up with some tailored answers.