Every Restaurant Needs A Customer Database - Part 2: Systems

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Every restaurant operator needs to have a systematized method of gathering customer names and contact information. This concept is rarely a problem - most business owners understand they need a database. The issues arise when they fail to create a SYSTEM that operates with very little, actual work.

Building a database for a restaurant is not that hard… after you get the operations in place. (That goes for most anything, doesn’t it?)

It’s really a matter of deciding HOW you want to get customer information. That effort then needs to be maximized so that it creates real, physical, monetary value that the accountant can see.

As with all things, I recommend developing a specific “roadmap” that describes what the task will look like. And before creating any map, I have to know my destination… my goal. For a customer database, I need to determine exactly what information I want.

At the beginning it’s not very important to know exactly why I need the information. This might seem odd, but with technology developing like it is, I tend to settle with getting as much information as I can so that if a way to use it becomes available, I will! The one caveat is to not get so personal that your customers think you’re crazy (ie. don’t make the comment card look like a loan application).

When “contact information” is mentioned, it isn’t necessary to limit that to an e-mail address. E-mail is great because it’s basically free and allows restaurant owners to contact several hundred people simultaneously… but it’s also limited for several reasons… one of them being the competition in the Inbox (more on that another time).

I usually ask for First and Last Name, Address, City, State, Zip Code, Phone Number and E-mail address.

Depending on the types of promotions a restaurant intends to do, other useful information would be Birthday, Wedding Anniversary dates, and even the Birthdays of children if the restaurant is family oriented.

After deciding what information will be collected, I sit down to brainstorm the number of tactics that can be used for getting it. Let me clarify that: I literally sit at my dining room table with a piece of printer paper and my favorite pen and write out my intentions. Putting thoughts onto paper helps me think through the system I’m about to develop.

When brainstorming I don’t limit myself to what marketing strategies are currently available — I consider all those that are possible, even if they’re out of my budget at the time.

The next part of the system creation is determining how the processes will be handled. Who will collect the information? Who will put it into a database format? What steps can be removed to make the process quicker? These are just a few questions to consider, and I’ll talk about more in the next article for this series.