Competing by restaurant analytical CRM

Abstract

Restaurant is one of the most competitive industries in Indonesia. To survive in the business, each restaurant has a goal to transform their customers into loyal customers. For achieving this goal, the restaurant cannot only provide tasty food but also should offer unique concepts that can fulfil the customers’ needs. A computer-based analytical Customer Relationship Management (a-CRM) can be used as a tool for understanding the loyal customers and for predicting the customers’ behaviour. However, most of the CRM implementation in Indonesian restaurants is only focus on operational CRM. There is still lack support in a-CRM. So, the restaurants still cannot obtain maximum benefit from the CRM implementation. The primary question is to what extent can a-CRM be developed for supporting the Indonesian restaurants in interacting with the customers? We address two research questions: (1) why should the Indonesian restaurants be supported by an a-CRM? and (2) how can a combination of an a- CRM and a KIS support the Indonesian restaurant? To answer these questions, we analyse the results of literature review and fieldwork (surveys and case studies). The findings of the study indicate that most of the Indonesian restaurants do not analyse in-depth the information gathered from their loyal customer. Thus, they fail to make a good emotional relationship with the loyal customers. In the paper we consider the use of knowledge intensive system to transform historical data on loyal customers into information about the customer behaviour. The restaurant’s employees may use the information resulted from the system for supporting them on how they should interact with the loyal customers, in particular for maintaining a positive emotional relationship between the customers and the restaurant and for increasing the sales to the customers. We conjecture that by using the computer-based a-CRM, in the long run, Indonesian restaurants can make better strategy in maintaining its relationship with their customers and in increasing the sales to the customers.