Use Otter Insights to Make Data-Driven Restaurant Decisions

In today’s restaurant industry, it can be difficult to understand how your business is performing, especially when you’re managing several brands, locations, and delivery apps. Are your sales meeting expectations? Are your staff’s activities efficient? How do each of your delivery partners stack up against one another? Otter Insights makes finding the answers to these questions easy, no matter how familiar you are with analytics. 

Insights provides you with a complete overview of your restaurant’s performance, and gives you the tools to enhance your operational strategy. In this introduction post, we’ll discuss how you can use Insights to evaluate your business, make informed decisions, and increase your restaurant’s profitability – all from a single place. Let’s get started!

Pain Points

The delivery landscape is extremely competitive, and restaurateurs need clear, actionable information to ensure that the decisions they’re making are the right ones. That’s why Insights collects data from across your entire business, including all of your locations, menus, and delivery partners. 

By giving you a detailed view of your restaurants’ performance, Insights lets you understand where you’re succeeding and where changes need to be made.

Using Insights

To start viewing Otter’s insights for your restaurant, go to the Insights app in the Otter Dashboard’s dropdown menu. You’ll see a list of tabs on the menu’s left side  – these are where you can view information about your business! Let’s go through these tabs:

Business

Use this tab to review sales and orders across all of your stores and channels. In this tab, you can see your complete Business Performance, Store Ranking, Channel Performance, and Fulfillment Performance. You can narrow down this information by location, timeframe, delivery app, and more by using the menus at the top of each block.

Operations

The “Operations” tab details how your business’s activities impact your revenue. In this tab, you can view your restaurants’ order issues, store availability, and cancellations. You can also click each block’s “View More” button for an even deeper analysis of every operation, and find out what’s causing issues.

Like the previous tab, you can organize this information by timeframe, store, order channel, and more! This tab is great for helping you identify – and correct – operational issues. The Operations tab is only available to Advanced Insights and Pro users.

Menu Performance

The “Menu Performance” tab gives you a thorough overview of your menus’ performance, customer-sourced item ratings, menu modifiers (like different sizes or add-ons), and popular item combinations. With the blocks in this tab, you can learn what your best-selling items are, what’s driving the most profit, and what’s helping you succeed!

This tab is ideal for discovering new sales opportunities through your menus, and is available to Advanced Insights and Pro users.

Marketing

Under this tab, you can view how your in-app promotions are performing across every one of your online delivery partners. The blocks on this tab’s dashboard display your Promotion Performance, your Promotion ROIs, Total Order Volume, Types of Promotions, Store Rankings, and Average Order Volume. The data shown on this tab compares promoted and unpromoted orders against one another and instantly calculates ROIs, helping you judge the value of your promotions easily. 

If you’re a Promotions by Otter user, this tab gets even better! Use the data you see here to empower your automated marketing campaign and make your promotions the best they can be.

Staff Insights

With the “Staff” tab, keeping your restaurant’s staff and customers happy is easy! Use the Labor as percentage of sales and Labor hours blocks for a snapshot of your staff’s overall health. Then, head to the Staff hours optimization and Orders per labor hour reports to make your staff schedule as efficient as possible. 

Advanced Insights and Otter Pro users also have access to the granular Staff Performance report: a detailed breakdown of each staff member’s Orders per hour, Average prep time, Average star rating, and more.

Reports

In this tab, you can see your business’s Gross Sales, Order Volume, Top Items by Units Sold, and Lost Sales. By clicking the “View Report” link at the bottom of each block, you’ll be able to see a detailed breakdown of your respective sales performance.

Each report contains both a Basic and Advanced list of information. Basic Reports are available to all Otter users and contain critical data on your restaurant’s sales. Advanced Reports give you a deeper understanding of your sales figures with additional metrics, such as prep time per order, and are only available to Advanced Insights and Pro users. 

With Otter Insights, it’s easy to export the data you’ve just seen into a variety of different formats. This data can then be used with Otter’s other analytics tools or shared with your accountant.

Ratings & Reviews

Advanced Insights and Pro users have access to the Ratings & Reviews tab: a consolidated overview of customer feedback from across all of your delivery partners. Use the Ratings Breakdown, Average Weekly Ratings, and Store Ratings blocks to see what your customers think of your business. 

Keep an eye on the 5 Most Recent Reviews block, too – it can help you understand how recent changes to your business are going down with eaters. If you want to achieve five-star ratings, this tab is your best resource!

Support

If you need help with any part of the Insights feature, just click the “Support” button in the bottom-right of your Otter window. You’ll be connected with an Otter Customer Support Representative who’s more than happy to help you succeed with Insights! Be sure to check out the Insights help documentation, too – it has plenty of guidance for every part of the Insights feature. 

How Insights Can Help

Insights makes understanding your restaurant’s operational success quick, easy, and convenient. The range of features offered by Insights grants you a complete understanding of your business’s data, and gives you exclusive access to information that you won’t find anywhere else. 

With Otter’s diverse array of partner integrations, Insights collects data from every one of your connected platforms, helping you optimize performance and profit across your entire business. When you use the information from Insights with Otter’s other products, you’ll have complete control of your restaurant’s operations, and be able to satisfy your customers’ cravings ASAP.

Enhance your restaurant’s decisions with Insights

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Insights by Otter is your key to making the best decisions for your restaurant. No matter how familiar you are with reviewing performance data, Insights makes it easy  to get more out of your budget, improve your menu, and boost your bottom line! 

Take advantage of the information that Insights provides, and you’ll find that succeeding as a modern restaurateur has never been more rewarding.

Enjoy Insights to go with the new Otter Restaurant Manager app, available now for iOS!

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