Lightspeed Restaurant Continues to Empower Independent Businesses Through Data and Analytics with New Advanced Insights Feature

Lightspeed Restaurant launches industry-leading analytics on its flagship restaurant platform to empower independent businesses to drive more revenue.

Lightspeed Commerce Inc., the one-stop commerce platform for merchants around the world to simplify, scale, and create exceptional customer experiences, today announced the expansion of its flagship hospitality product, Lightspeed Restaurant, to include Lightspeed Advanced Insights. 

The best-in-class-solution has taken a step further in empowering restaurant owners to make confident business decisions using clear and actionable insights from analytics that work seamlessly in the background. Powered by Lightspeed Payments, the Lightspeed Advanced Insights add-on eliminates guesswork with instantaneous analysis for actionable insights. Data from every transaction processed is automatically captured, analyzed, then delivered right back to restaurateurs – identifying trends, such as which menu items will turn a guest into a repeat customer or which staff member is performing at top level, that reveal impactful ways for merchants to optimize their business. 

“Restaurants are doubling down on technology and automation, and we are continuing to deliver,” said Peter Dougherty, GM, Hospitality, Lightspeed. “In pursuit of empowering independent businesses, we are thrilled to offer yet another powerful solution that will allow restaurateurs to optimize their operations. Lightspeed Advanced Insights gives restaurant owners confidence to make quick decisions they trust to improve their business by providing analytics that go way deeper than traditional reporting.”

Lightspeed Advanced Insights is Comprised of Five Different Modules:

• Insights That Help Increase Revenue: 
  • Magic Menu Quadrant – Break down specific menu items at-a-glance in terms of “One-Hit Wonders”, “Greatest Hits”, “Underperformers”, and “Hidden Gems”. Measure the success of a menu change in real-time and make strategic adjustments to offerings with data from menu performance.
  • Sales – Sales analytics make it easy to understand day-to-day operations and compare sales trends over time. Empowered with the actual data behind restaurant operations, easily make business decisions regarding staffing, locations management, as well as identify which menu items are bringing people back in for more. 
  • Servers – Get an insightful personalized report card for each server to identify the rockstars, help boost their earnings, and uncover coaching opportunities to confidently make decisions that impact the bottom line.
• Guest Book Lifts Consumer Lifetime Value: Creating a unique guest profile for everyone who pays with a credit card, Guest Book automatically collects useful data on each guest such as preferred payment methods to determine which devices and flows increase ticket size and cover count. 
• Campaigns:  Define a time range to dynamically track sales and visits compared to the restaurant’s average. Use data to identify how guests respond to new hours, events, or marketing pushes. 
• Daily Digest: Review daily highlights including logbook, shift notes, pay in and payout. Raw data is translated into understandable insights alongside qualitative feedback from servers. 
• Logbook: Logbook makes it easy for staff to record comments from the day’s shift. Customize the questions and checklists to suit your restaurant’s unique operations.

“Lightspeed Advanced Insights helps us break down how a server is performing in terms of hitting upselling goals,” said Jared Downs, Owner and Operator of Freshwater Tavern. “We can quickly look at if they are getting customers to add craft cocktails to 20 percent of meals, for example, or selling a bottle of wine to 5 percent of tables. Every restaurant has different priorities and Lightspeed can program around those priorities, but for us that information is super valuable and it helps us work with servers for them to get higher sales and thus more tips.”

Lightspeed sales data from nearly 6,000 US hospitality merchants shows that while inflation rose 8.26% on a year-over-year basis in August, menu prices have only increased 5.56%, on average, over the same period. At the same time, food costs are pacing ahead of inflation. When adjusting for inflation, this means margins for restaurants are going down.* Lightspeed Advanced Insights enables restaurant owners to make decisions that directly impact their business by understanding top spending customers, waitstaff performance, busiest hours and day of the week and menu items that generate repeat customers.

Lightspeed powers the world’s best restaurants, including: Five Guys, Daniel Boulud Group (NYC), Alinea Group (Chicago), Canlis (Seattle), Gloria (London), Kei (Paris), 893 Ryōtei (Berlin) and Maybe Sammy (Sydney). These new Lightspeed Restaurant features are now available in North America.

Read the full press release to learn more.