Did you know the average lifespan of a club is less than two years? Let’s work together to bring that average up. In fact, it’s easier than you might think. With the right tools, processes, and systems in place, you’ll be on your way to gaining more loyalty and maximizing profits for years to come.
Here are 5 tools you need in your wheelhouse to grow your venue.
1. Integrated Point of Sale (POS) System
Integrated POS systems equate to bigger and better data. It takes your club beyond transactional information, giving you insight into rich details of your club’s results, employee performance, individual guest sales, and trending liquor sales. The best way to integrate your POS system is to connect it with other areas of your club (including the ones listed below) through a platform that handles web and mobile POS options. This type of integrated system not only collects deeper information, but also reports it in ways that help you make better business decisions.
2. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System
Your guests – especially your VIP ones – don’t want to be treated like a number. They should be greeted at the door, walked to their table, offered their personal top-purchased liquors, and attended to by their favorite server. Having a CRM system in place helps track this information to give seamless service from all staff members. What’s more is this CRM system boosts upsales for your venue by recommending items based on the guest’s history and interests. You can also upsell a non-VIP customer before they even walk in your door by identifying them in line. The CRM system will tell you if a guest is a regular attendee, which means you have the opportunity to upsell them to bottle service right then and there. The personal treatment you’re able to offer will provide your guests with a better experience, making them more loyal and more likely to refer friends to your venue.
3. Reservation Management System
Too many clubs operate with pen and paper to manage table reservations. Some have graduated onto email as their medium of choice, but this still results in double-booked tables and other errors. It’s nearly impossible to keep track of reservations using these old school processes. Reservations are coming in from different sources, tables are over promised, and what ends up getting marked down isn’t true to what’s actually going to happen that night. That’s where the reservation management system comes into place. Just give your employees and partners access to the system with their own personal login where they can add a reservation for a specific night and choose tables that are only available for that time-slot. This streamlines your process to maximize efficiency and accuracy.
4. Analytics System
This is where that rich data we discussed above comes into play. An analytics system takes the guessing work out of the numbers that are being reported. It shows exactly what you want to know about a given area of your club, including your customers. With this type of system, you’re able to define how much money you made or lost over a given time period, whether an event was profitable, which promoters are bringing in the most guests, and which servers are performing the best. All of this information leads to insight about your club to make better decisions for the future.
5. Mobile App for Staff
The best scenario is when all of the above tools are programmed to connect to each other through a mobile application. Why bother with five different technologies if it’s going to add five different processes to your club? New technology has emerged to group all of these tools together under one platform that operates both on the web and on mobile devices. Installing this type of platform and giving employees and promoters access to the system streamlines and centralizes your processes.
Whitney Johnson is the global director of marketing for BookBottles. Contact her at whitney.johnson@bookbottles.com.
