Using Data To Leverage The Customer Experience

Food is serious business. Now, on The Main Course, host Barbara Castiglia will invite insiders on the front lines of food to share their expertise, strategies, and forecasts for navigating the ever-changing restaurant industry.

In restaurants, chefs, managers, and owners pay attention to the food, the dining room, and the service. These are important, but one often overlooked aspect that does not get examined is restaurant data. Covering everything from revenue to insights on the waitlist, data can give important information about how a restaurant is performing and how they are improving the guest experience.

Giving insights on this episode of The Main Course with Host Barbara Castiglia is Mike Vichich, the Co-Founder and CEO of Wisely, the leading Customer Intelligence platform for restaurants — empowering brands to say goodbye to transactions and hello to customers. Wisely brings everything you know about each customer to every interaction— from how guests are greeted at the door to how they’re personally invited back across marketing channels.

Vichich’s background is in the front of the house. Starting as a server in high school and college, he learned very quickly how important it is to deliver a great guest experience. These experiences meant more than good feelings for servers, as it often came to dollars and cents.

“I learned very quickly, partly because it was trained, but partly because it was just intuitive, that if you deliver a great guest experience, you get tipped more.” – Mike Vichich

But, it was also about building authentic relationships with the guests. These insights would be helpful when he moved into the corporate world, as one of his first positions involved customer acquisition and retention, which involved a lot of analytical work. The brands that he worked with were getting sophisticated with how they were interacting with customers. This involved using all the data at their disposal to better their experience at every touchpoint.

With these insights from both the restaurant and the corporate world, Vichich connected the dots between data, customers, and restaurants. Listen to hear more about how Wisely uses data to make better connections with customers.