CDP Basics

A simple explanation of a restaurant CDP

What Is a Restaurant CDP? In Simple Terms, Without Technical Jargon

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.

Problems that a CDP solves for:

  • Your customer data lives all over the place. The platforms you use specialize in a certain area of expertise, and they collect data on that type of customer behavior only.
  • You have no way to see, understand, or report on your guests. Because your data is in different places, you can’t see customer John or Jane or Jim in one place. You see pieces of their guest experience in different places but it’s never shown in aggregate. This makes analyzing behaviors, finding trends, and seeing revenue difficult.
  • You can’t make business decisions easily because 20%+ of your time is spent on gathering data and combing through numbers and guest data in spreadsheets.

Restaurant CDP Platforms:

Here are a few platform names you might recognize:

  • Segment.io
  • Tealium
  • Simon Data

A restaurant CDP ingests data from these platforms:

  • Point of sale (POS)
  • Reservations system
  • Online ordering system
  • Third-party delivery apps (DoorDash, UberEats, Grubhub, Postmates)
  • Loyalty programs

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:

  • How much revenue has my email driven?
  • How much revenue are my operating systems bringing in across all locations?
  • Which of my guests have spent more than $1000 across all platforms?

Can you explain the problem specific to restaurant data?

The problem is complicated, and it’s a big one. Let’s hop in and tackle it.

Issues arising from digital transformations:

  • The maître d' and hosts have gone from taking reservations by hand to using a reservation platform.
  • Front-of-house staff have gone from takeout orders over the phone to using online ordering.
  • Restaurant establishments have gone from being cash-only establishments to using a POS system for dine-in checks.

Challenges for reporting:

  • Export dine-in POS data
  • Export reservations data
  • Export online ordering data
  • Export third-party data for reservations & delivery apps
  • Export loyalty data

Typical week scenario:

  • CEO asks business questions that no one is able to easily answer.
  • CFO manually exports data from systems to build their own dashboards (in Excel).
  • COO exports reports from various platforms and tries to find patterns.

Potential benefits when a CDP is able to solve these issues:

  • CFOs and CMOs get a self-serve platform for understanding and using guest data.
  • COO can easily see revenue in one place across all platforms.

What’s the pay-off?

A CDP helps you track and improve:

  • Customer lifetime value
  • Frequency
  • Recency
  • Customer personas
  • KPIs by location, menu item, daypart, etc.

Other Customer Data Platform FAQs

What are the main benefits?

A CDP gives you a persistent, unified view of your customer database that makes actionable insights accessible in real-time.