Why Data and Technology are the cornerstones of your business

The world has never moved as fast as it currently does when it comes to technology, take for example the music industry. 

Vinyl had a run for around a century as the choice for how listeners enjoyed music, then in the late 70s cassette tapes became the prominent tool for music. Fast forward 20 years, and the compact disc and walkman had taken over. 

15 years later around the mid 2000’s, we were all downloading our music from the iTunes store (or downloading from not so legal sources if we’re being honest!) – ten years on from that, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who didn’t have a Spotify or Apple Music account. 

What we’re getting at is there has been more technological innovation in the past 40 years than there was in the 100 years before that. 

And your business is no exception – both with what customers, and prospective customers, expect from your business, but also how technology and the subsequent data that comes with it can help shape your business into an industry leading beast. 

No one likes working in a messy room..

Have you ever had the unfortunate experience of having to work in a really messy, or cluttered room? It can be hard to focus, everything seems distracting and your efficiency levels probably take a hit because of this, verses when you work in a spotless environment. 

Think of your technology stack like this, if you’ve got a different application for every part of your business, you’ve probably got a pretty messy technology stack.

Let’s look at the impact of this:

• More technology that you and your staff need to learn how to use
• More time spent on different applications
• A higher cost as you’re paying for multiple applications
• Lack of same data across platforms – impacting your ability to have a unified view of your business

We’ve previously covered the benefits of software stack consolidation for FECs here, however for a short recap, having an all-in-one platform pretty much counters all of the above negatives, with a key one in our opinion being the ability to have a full view of your business from one centralised management point, and truly understand your customers and their subsequent data – giving you what we call Customer360:

“Customer360 is a 360 degree view of a customer’s data including every interaction, from a website inquiry to a product purchase to a customer support ticket.”

One seamless experience to manage your guests whole interaction with your business

A guests experience with you exists far outside of the time they’re inside the walls of your venue, in fact it starts as soon as they first see your listing on Google when they’re searching for days out. 

Once they land on your website, you want your CTA to clearly direct them to the booking section of your website, with that booking process encompassing everything consumers expect from modern technology – a fast load speed, a perfect user experience, an easy to use user interface and payment options like ApplePay, Klarna and Google Pay.

Because waivers are also on the same platform as the booking system, these are also easily and quickly filled out before guests visit which means on arrival they can quickly scan their QR code and bypass any queues. 

Post visit, your guest receives an automated questionnaire so you can gauge feedback, with a 10% promotional code sent out after they complete this which helps encourage revisitation. The automated questionnaire email also includes a section with an upsell to your membership scheme, guaranteeing you fixed income from that guest.

Having one piece of technology to manage this whole experience creates a seamless experience for your guests, only enhancing your reputation amongst your customer base and takes away a whole bunch of headaches for your business. 

You’re sitting on a gold mine

Using the right technology platform likely means you’re sitting on an absolute treasure trove of data, and you may not even realise it. 

Through your booking, waiver & POS data alone, you can work out things like:

• Average guest/booking owner age and gender
• How they found you
• Average spend per booking
• Geographical areas with the most spend with your business
• Most successful promotions
• Top selling second line spend items
• Most popular booking slots
• Time of the day people make the most bookings via your website

Using this data you can build out successful marketing campaigns that target the people most likely to convert, at the right time, in the right places and increasing your conversion rate. 

This data will also help you tweak messaging, optimise promotions, your second line spend items and ultimately providing more business intelligence than ever before. 

Conclusion 

As you can see, technology and data can completely transform your business, both from an ease of use for both you and your customers, providing a seamless experience across the platform and then utilising the data captured by one platform, you can optimise your marketing to maximum effect and retain existing customers and keep fresh faces coming through the door. 

If you’re curious to see more, complete the form below to go through an interactive demo of the BookNow Software platform manages this whole experience for your business.