InetSoft Webinar: Business Intelligence is a Partnership

This is the continuation of the transcript of a Webinar hosted by InetSoft on the topic of "Improving Corporate Performance Management." The speaker is Abhishek Gupta, product manager at InetSoft.

Business intelligence is a partnership between all of the people inside our company, IT, finance, operations, and marketing. It’s really a collaborative partnership. We do have a rich data warehouse of information as I mentioned that we extract from our POS system, and that’s where a lot of our information comes from.

So it just tells us everything we need to know about our business transactions, how they are being used, when they are being done, who is doing them, and we do some pretty extensive reporting out of that. So yeah, we ride the herd, and we believe that all that information is very valuable. We have a lot of opportunity to improve that on our side as we continue to grow, as we continue to introduce new items into our menu.

So there is some work for us do, but the intelligence and the partnership inside the company is really important. This SoMoClo is sort of a new term for me as a CFO, but being in a company that really believes in technology and really staying ahead of it, we take social media in two pieces.

We take it as a customer experience, and by that I mean we can both take orders. So within Facebook and Twitter, on our Facebook and Twitter, which have, upwards of 10,000 likes or 10,000 followers on Twitter, you are actually able to, if you are following us, you are actually able to order through Facebook and Twitter.

Our core demographic is between 18 and 34, a lot of our locations are in the City of Boston, near colleges, so we really get a lot of younger folks either in their college years or just post college years, young professionals that are using this technology and we have found that for them to be able to do anything they want on a mobile device, on a tablet, or whatnot is important. So we have linked our ordering system, our online ordering system on to those two social media platforms.

Now the other important thing about Facebook and Twitter from a customer engagement is that, this has become the facility to carry on a conversation between us and the customer. We don’t necessarily look at the social media platforms as advertisement vehicles. We have used Youtube and Instagram in different ways, but Facebook and Twitter are really about listening to our customers.

So, we get constant feedback through the Facebook and Twitter lines, and you can imagine, good or bad, and when it’s bad, I mean, all this information now out in the open, is important for us to pay attention to. So, we use it as a way to experience the concept, but we also use it as a way to listen, and that listening part is where the data that we get becomes very important.

We have a central hub that we feed all of the comments that we get back, not only through our own internal website, but also through Facebook and Twitter, and we can aggregate that data and look at trends whether a restaurant had a bad service period, or we are entering into a new market, and how people are, resonating to the brand.

So we have used that information collected from Facebook and Twitter. And there are companies out there that are doing that, but we have internally been able to grab that data and slice it together to give us some insight as to how the operations are going either in a certain area, in a certain restaurant, or how certain employees are doing because we get a lot of feedback about our employees.

And then on the other side on the social media, with Youtube, Instagram, and our mobile application, we have something called media outlets, and we have used that in a couple of ways. We have used that to let people know about us, how we source our ingredients. We have actually done trips to, you know, places around the world.

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We call ourselves globally inspired, so we have sent people to these globally inspired places and done research on the inspiration for say teriyaki or Memphis BBQ or the Buffalo Burrito, and we have displayed that on our Youtube channel, so that if people are just looking us up they can learn about our brand.

The mobile application just isn’t the menu. There is actually a lot of interaction that we can communicate to the guest about who we are, and then secondly on Instagram, it’s not just using that for updates. That’s actually a two-way engagement. We use that to both, send information via photos out to our customers and also receive it, and we have run contests with Instagram.