How Your Restaurant Can Step Up the Restaurant Experience with Data

Data and technology are used in restaurants but not used to build
relationships. It’s mainly used to track customer purchases,
track inventory, scheduling and reservations. Joel Montaniel, the
CEO of SevenRooms, wanted to change that. He talked with Barbara
Castiglia on The Main Course about data and how operators can
build better relationships with customers.


Montaniel always wanted to build businesses and be an
entrepreneur. He started in finance, and he got paid well, but it
was an unfulfilling job.


“But, I wasn’t getting that itch scratched,” he said.


His passion for restaurants started when he found himself going
to them during his free time. He didn’t have much free time, so
he wasn’t able to attend them enough to become a regular. This
piqued his curiosity and passion for restaurants. It started on
the customer side but eventually led to the business side.


The idea for SevenRooms came when he noticed that if you didn’t
attend a restaurant enough, they wouldn’t know anything about the
customer. “They were numbers, not faces.”


“No matter what we could do for the consumer, the operator needed
to pay for a role,” Montaniel said.


That was their lightbulb moment: Instead of focusing on the
consumer, what if we focused on the operator.


SevenRooms helps restaurant operators leverage customer data to
improve the experience. As part of their service, they offer
Pickup and Delivery solutions; Reservation, Waiting, and Seating
Management; Data and Guest Profiles; Guest Engagement, and
Marketing.


“In the early days, typical to a lot of startups, we wanted to
become a company that was all about technology helping businesses
build relationships with people,” Montaniel said. In restaurants,
relationships and people are the most important thing. It’s all
about who you know. Technology is mostly transactional and
focuses on purchases, etc. They wanted to change this
perspective.