The nightclub industry has evolved from inefficient pen-and-paper practices to digital solutions that can manage and track all areas of your business. While these solutions may seem complex and overwhelming, they’re actually quite simple when it’s a fully integrated platform that’s connected into your daily operations. Because when you have a system that’s fully integrated, you’re able to manage and oversee all areas of your venue from one central spot.
Here are 5 ways an integrated technology platform will help you run a better nightclub.
1. Your point of sale (POS) system will provide better data
Integrated POS systems equate to bigger and better data. It takes your club beyond transactional information, giving you insight into rich details of your club’s results, employee performance, individual guest sales, and trending liquor sales. This is the type of information that gives you critical insight into how your venue is performing, allowing you to make better business decisions.
2. You will know your guests on a deeper level
Your guests – especially your VIP ones – don’t want to be treated like a number. They should be greeted at the door, walked to their table, offered their personal top-purchased liquors, and attended to by their favorite server. Having a customer relationship management (CRM) system in place helps track this information to give seamless service from all staff members. What’s more is this CRM system boosts upsales for your venue by recommending items based on the guest’s history and interests. You can also upsell a non-VIP customer before they even walk in your door by identifying them in line. The CRM system will tell you if a guest is a regular attendee, which means you have the opportunity to upsell them to bottle service right then and there. The personal treatment you’re able to offer will provide your guests with a better experience, making them more loyal and more likely to refer friends to your venue.
3. You can better manage VIP reservations
Nightclubs used to operate with pen and paper to manage table reservations. Some have graduated onto email as their medium of choice, but this still results in double-booked tables and other errors. It’s nearly impossible to keep track of reservations using these old school processes. Reservations are coming in from different sources, tables are over promised, and what ends up getting marked down isn’t true to what’s actually going to happen that night. That’s where the reservation management system comes into place. Just give your employees and partners access to the system with their own personal login where they can add a reservation for a specific night and choose tables that are only available for that time-slot. This streamlines your process to maximize efficiency and accuracy.
4. You get to see how your venue is performing through in-depth analytics
This is where that rich data we discussed above comes into play. An analytics system takes the guessing work out of the numbers that are being reported. It shows exactly what you want to know about a given area of your club, including your customers. With this type of system, you’re able to define how much money you made or lost over a given time period, whether an event was profitable, which promoters are bringing in the most guests, and which servers are performing the best. All of this information leads to insight about your club to make better decisions for the future.
5. You can handle every aspect of your club while on-the-go
The best scenario is when all of the above tools are programmed to connect to each other through a mobile application. Why bother with five different technologies if it’s going to add five different processes to your club? Integrated technology groups all of these tools together under one platform that operates both on the web and on mobile devices so you can manage your venue even when you’re not physically there. This also allows you to better manage promoters, improve marketing efforts, and increase sales before the night begins.
Whitney Johnson is the global director of marketing at BookBottles. Contact her at whitney.johnson@bookbottles.com.
