Guide
A simple explanation of a restaurant CDP
By
Staff
Apr 14, 2022
First thing’s first:
Which type of “CDP” are you interested in?
Pick your path: the data-related CDP or the kitchen-role CDP.
Path 1: If you want to learn more about the kitchen role CDP, or a “chef de partie,” — we’ll keep this brief. Check out this great post for more information.
(Long story short: a kitchen-staff CDP is a person who supports both the sous chef and head chef and focuses on food quality, purchases, ingredients, and plate prep.)
Path 2: If you’re here for the data CDP, great. You’re in the right place. Let’s keep going.
A restaurant CDP, or customer data platform, is a platform that’s put in place to centralize guest data and help it talk to marketing systems.
The term “CDP” wasn’t coined until 2013. It’s a relatively recent concept, which makes sense, if you think about the proliferation of new tech platforms over the past decade. We had to build out and live through the problem before a CDP could enter and solve it.
Here are the problems that a CDP solves for:
So take this problem, across any industry, and let it marinate — for years and years.
You have these data silos and teams working around them, digging deeper and deeper, establishing processes with workarounds. While workarounds become hardened in time, so does the visibility of the problem. More systems are added, more manual exports and imports, and more frustration from leadership that this can’t be a sustainable way to carry the business.
(The demand for a solution was there; the supply just wasn't. All of these business leaders needed a way to bring together their data automatically.)
So, finally, the concept of a CDP enters the scene. Here are a few platform names you might recognize:
See a wider landscape of CDPs here — this includes a graph of top contenders for CDPs that are cross-industry platforms.
But, if you’re in the restaurant industry, you know that you have a very specific technology stack. These general CDPs that ingest data for B2B technology companies have a very different set of integrations than the ones that leaders at multi-location restaurants need.
That’s why a restaurant-specific, vertical tool like Bikky exists. You need a CDP that was built specifically for enterprise restaurants.
A restaurant CDP ingests data from these platforms:
In addition to data aggregation, a restaurant CDP also connects this data to marketing systems and ties marketing engagement back to revenue. The CDP becomes a system of record for guest data with business insights that drill all the way down to revenue, past click-throughs, open rates, impressions, sales conversions, et cetera.
A CDP helps you to answer questions like:
Glad you asked. The problem is complicated, and it’s a big one. Let’s hop in and tackle it.
Like we said, there has been a huge digital transformation in the past two decades. What’s interesting for restaurants is this has increased exponentially the past few years.
You get it?
So the problem is, while all of these digital platforms have favored the operator with their innovation, increasing the speed in service, they’ve all done so in siloed platforms, which makes corporate reporting more and more difficult.
A c-suite leader who wants to report on revenue across the tech stack needs their team to:
So operators are moving faster, but back-office teams aren’t. In fact, they’re moving slower and slower as new platforms are added to the tech stack.
At one level, this makes it difficult for marketers to see data across all platforms and to send targeted communications.
At another level, it strips the ability to get business insights from every c-suite leader and general manager (GM):
Here’s what a typical week might look like:
CEO asks business questions that no one is able to easily answer.
Potential benefits that come up when a CDP is able to solve for these issues:
A CDP helps you track and improve:
Because of this, there are also the secondary benefits of:
As Olga Berkovich Lopategui explains, “A CDP like Bikky allows you to run instant queries and surfaces dashboard analytics to see — who is actually purchasing from my campaign? Is it a new guest? A lapsed guest? A frequent guest? Are there different levels of adoption based on retention tiers? Do new guests respond to different offers than frequent guests?”
A CDP gives you a persistent, unified view of your customer database. Let’s break that down:
Persistent = your team doesn’t have to keep doing exports from your various platforms to match together pieces of the guest journey, or slices of the reporting you need. It all lives in one place so the data is collected for you, presented in a viewable format, analyzed to surface the metrics you need, made flexible to manipulate the reporting view as you’d like, and made actionable for your team to take action in real-time (i.e. trigger marketing campaigns, present to general managers, etc.).
Unified = everything you need is one place, which means your team isn’t having to spend time going to different places to gather data. It’s a time-savings, a sanity-protector, and a budget-cutting benefit potentially by no longer requiring top-tier packages on all of your individual platforms to get the reporting you need. One system of record to access, analyze, and act on your data.
Bikky is a CDP for restaurants. We break down silos across POS, online ordering, reservation, and loyalty platforms to give a 360° view of guests. Brands like Boqueria, Urbanspace, and Westville use deep insights in Bikky to personalize engagement and to 3x customer lifetime value.
