A lesson in knowing your Data

While I was working on business intelligence reports at a well known UK based restaurant group (no not Jamies lol) they had some "consultants" come in to show them what items their customers bought together

They wanted this as they would like to update their set meals to try and drive more repeat business.

Now that's great makes logical sense to start with wanting to drive more repeat business so make it easier for your customers to do so.

Sounds simple doesn't it?

Well, it is...

If you do it right

Now the consultants they brought in were from one of the big four. And their model being sending the graduates out to prove themselves started well.

All bushy eyed and raring to go to get their hands on all the datas.

Pushing through their nicely designed scripts and outputting a load of accountancy type figures

It was great they put it all into a nice long as hell powerpoint presentation showing them what things they should sell together

Do you know what it showed?

It showed the top items to be bought together were a classic Vesuvio and coke were the most popular items to be bought together.

Ok fair that sounds good get that as a deal

Hold on a second though that already is a deal...

And as we went through that list all of their recommendations were the deals they already had on the menu.

So just to make sure we weren't jumping to conclusions we asked them. When they did their analysis did they remove all the data that related to set meal purchases?

What do you think their reaction to that was?

It had never crossed their mind to do that. They were so focused on getting into the data and doing their magic they lost focus on the actual question that was being asked.

The lesson from all of this is no matter where you are in business know your data. You may be looking at a graph on FB and it looks great with engagement but it may not be actually converting.

You don't have to become an expert in the data world.

You just need a method to translate your business strategy into questions that you can ask of your data and make sure you know where it is.

Or get the expertise in to give you the answers (just not the over-keen consultants)

It all flows from Strategy to Questions to data to information to insights to wisdom and ultimately action

And you don't need ridiculous amounts to spend on tech. You could do it all on excel or google sheets (I am no recommending this lol)