What is a Chain Restaurant and What Tech Tools Does it Need?

Running a single hospitality venue can feel like enough of a job on its own. However, many restaurateurs can enjoy high levels of success by expanding into chain restaurants.

To operate a restaurant chain as effectively as possible, you need the right tech tools on your side. 

In this blog, we’ll explain what sets chain restaurants apart and the considerations required to optimise operations for multi-venue hospitality businesses.

Plus, we have even more support for restaurant groups here.

What is a chain restaurant?

A chain restaurant is a series of restaurants owned by an individual, group or umbrella company that shares the same name, brand quality, and customer experience. To build brand recognition and customer loyalty, a chain needs to maintain consistent quality in food, service, and presentation across venues. 

Read our guide on Restaurant Branding: How to Build an Iconic Restaurant Identity to establish a strong, coherent restaurant brand at one venue before beginning to expand into additional venues.

The day-to-day management of a chain restaurant, including operations and menu offerings, is controlled by the central operator in order to maintain the necessary consistency and uniformity. Individual venues don’t make standalone choices like they may have done historically, as part of a chain restaurant, all decision-making is done with visibility across the entire group.

There are some significant differences between chain restaurants and other kinds of hospitality venues, but the central goal of delivering great food and service is the same.

Chain restaurants vs restaurant franchises

A chain restaurant is a brand owned and operated by a single controlling parent company. A restaurant franchise is a brand operated by independent owners who take on daily management of one or more venues.

For example, if a restaurant business has four or more venues managed by the same company, then it’s a chain restaurant. If a restaurant business has multiple locations that are all managed by different people, and these people are responsible for daily operations, it’s a franchise.

Why are the tech needs of chain restaurants different from other venues?

The tech needs of a chain restaurant are different from other types of hospitality venues because chain restaurants must prioritise:

• Easy management of multiple venues: Tech for chain restaurants needs to be able to service multiple venues at once. Businesses must offer simple management and consistency when it comes to things like booking processes.  For example, with ResDiary's Cross-Sell widget, customers can place a booking at any restaurant within your business via a central booking widget connected to all restaurant diaries within the chain.
  
  
• Shared data: A chain restaurant has an increased reliance on multi-site and cloud functionality to give owners easy oversight across multiple venues, for things like table management or safety compliance. This makes systems like ResDiary and Trail vital. ResDiary makes it easy to view data across multiple venues, enabling you to know exactly what’s going on in your restaurant group every night, while Trail allows you to manage all aspects of healthy and safety compliance and due diligence in a single location.  
  
  
• Consistent experience: A chain restaurant must offer customers a consistent experience at each location when it comes to food and service quality. ResDiary gives your staff and your customers a simplified booking diary to ensure that reservations are easy to make and find across all your venues. By optimising your processes, your team can offer better service to each and every customer.
  
  
• Inventory management: One area that can be significantly more complex for chain restaurants is inventory management. A multi-venue approach to inventory management requires a high level of oversight across different locations. This makes data used for inventory management, such as POS reporting, even more important. You must have accurate, comprehensive data to help your business make the right financial decisions.

The most important tech tools for chain restaurants

Quality tech for a chain restaurant is crucial to maintaining brand quality. Here are the most important tech and software tools for your chain restaurant to prioritise:

Table management system

A high-quality table management system (TMS) is crucial for any chain restaurant. With the right TMS, you can maintain consistent customer experiences and manage your bookings more effectively across multiple venues. You can also enjoy all the benefits of moving away from costly pen-and-paper alternatives.

The ResDiary reservation management system works across multiple venues, giving you insight into bookings across all venues. You can set up smart rules to automatically control the flow of bookings and use a broad array of other features to help your staff streamline admin tasks.

With ResDiary’s Cross-Sell widget, you can also ensure your business never misses out on a booking.

Often, when customers want to book a time that is not available at your business, they will simply go to a different restaurant. By cross-selling, you can offer that customer their preferred time and date at a different venue in your business, capturing their booking momentum and keeping it within your chain.

A TMS also gives you a comprehensive understanding of your booking data. With this data, you gain a clear overview of everything from upcoming events to your peak periods.

You can then make informed decisions about your staff schedules and your inventory management. When operating a restaurant chain, these benefits are multiplied across your business.

A quality table management system also enables versatile integrations to streamline and automate your business. Software like W8List™ lets you record information about waiting customers. You can provide an accurate estimate of waiting times and automatically get in touch with a waiting patron when a table is available.

You can also use ResPhone to automatically answer phone calls and accept bookings when your team isn’t able to answer the phone. ResDiary’s broad range of tools is ideal for streamlining operations across your restaurant chain.

EPOS software

Using reliable EPOS software across all of your venues will make it easier to create a consistent customer experience for your brand. In addition to more consistent quality and streamlined operations, EPOS software gives you a clearer oversight of the financial performance of each venue.

Solutions like ResDiary’s AccessEPoS integration gives your restaurant business a unified platform to increase your efficiency, streamline your operations and focus more on your patrons. 

This easily configurable software lets you manage floor plans for easy payments and redeem booking deposits. That’s all in addition to providing reliable sales processing day-in and day-out for your chain restaurant.

With PowerEPOS integration from Triniteq, you can enjoy all the benefits of a synchronised system for booking management and payments too. Front-of-house staff get an accurate view of each table, and ResDiary pre-payments are automatically added to the system. 

PowerEPOS also collects important customer data, such as preferences and requests, and adds this information to customer profiles. This helps your staff provide your guests with the best experience possible.

Using a consistently great EPOS system across your chain restaurants also makes it easy for your employees to work flexibly in a different venue with the same software. Above all, your customers know they can enjoy a seamless payment process, no matter which location they visit.

Marketing tools

A chain restaurant needs a unified marketing approach. This ensures that your restaurant brand is clear and that your customers have a consistent perception of each of your venues. With the proper marketing tools, your business can maintain your brand while driving more business for your chain.

ResDiary makes it easier to incorporate marketing campaigns into your business with built-in email marketing functionality. Your emails can be easily branded and automatically triggered to be sent for booking confirmations, follow-ups and more.

You can also rely on quality integrations like Silverstreet. Silverstreet uses automated SMS communications to reinforce your brand and drive more visits to your business. 

ResDiary helps you collect customer data to create an intricate marketing portfolio based on diner preferences. Details such as regular booking time and booking notes can be used to tailor effective, personal marketing to each of your customers. 

By collecting data across multiple venues, you can personalise your marketing across a large database of customers.

Customer relationship management software

As a chain restaurant, you may be dealing with hundreds of customers across multiple venues each week. Building and maintaining a positive relationship with each of them can therefore be a significant challenge. 

With quality customer relationship management (CRM) software, your business can effectively automate and manage your customer interactions across all your venues. CRMs also enable your business to bring data points on your customers together and create vivid visitor profiles across your brand.

Acteol is a customer relationship management tool trusted by thousands of restaurants and pubs across the UK. With Acteol, you can turn your marketing campaigns into business revenue by knitting customer data points from all your venues into a single customer overview.

You can leverage the clear and structured data insights Acteol gives you into tailored campaigns for better marketing activity across your chain. 

TalkBox by Impact Data, available in Australia, is another CRM solution that helps your business secure more reservations and increase customer loyalty. This is done through automated communication crafted for specific guests. By using automated messages to welcome and check up on customers, you can drive more repeat visits and build a friendly rapport with regular engagement. 

When you integrate these tools with ResDiary, you can use CRM solutions to promote multiple restaurants in your business. You can use the information you gather to effectively cross-promote your locations.

Data analytics

Having the right data at your disposal can be a critical part of success and failure in hospitality, especially for multi-venue businesses.

A chain restaurant must have a thorough understanding of all relevant data points. This includes everything from customer demographics to financial performance. With data analytics tools, you can clearly view and analyse the vital data of your business.

ResDiary offers multiple ways to collect and analyse your chain restaurant’s data. With ResDiary’s table management software, you can collect extensive information about your customers from booking trends and personal dining preferences. EPOS system integrations also give you an overview of sales data, allowing you to have even more information to work with. 

Besides quality integrations, ResDiary has a full analytics suite that gives you a full overview of all your booking data, as well as information gained from integrations. With restaurant analytics, you can ensure you are taking the right actions to increase your profit margin and have all the information you need to make the best decisions for your chain restaurant.

You can even use this data to create restaurant forecasts. This allows you to make informed decisions about expanding your restaurant chain.

Inventory management systems

A chain restaurant can benefit from standardised inventory management practices being present across all locations. A centralised inventory management system for a chain restaurant can be easy for staff to use and enables real-time tracking and analysis of stock levels across all your venues. 

For larger chains, this level of multi-site management may not be feasible. However, you should still have central oversight of inventory management in your business.

With integrated table management and EPOS systems, your business can gauge the popularity and demand of certain menu items and inform your approach to your inventory going forward. 

Using this information, you can adjust inventory to create more of your most popular dishes and avoid overstocking. You can also gain a better understanding of how your locations differ from one another. 

It’s also vital to reduce the food waste in your restaurant. With effective inventory management processes, you can minimise wastage and improve your bottom line.

Employee scheduling and payroll

Chain restaurants must manage staff across multiple venues. It’s therefore crucial that employee scheduling and payroll are effectively streamlined. 

With the right software solutions, you can far more easily manage these areas of your business. You can also optimise your staffing levels, helping your restaurant reduce labour costs and overstaffing, two issues that are amplified as your chain restaurant expands and the necessity to optimise operations increases. 

Across a multi-venue business, managers may lack the time to create or update complex staff schedules in a manual way. With automated scheduling software, managers can automate the time-consuming scheduling process across your entire chain and focus on other critical aspects of the business.

Rotaready is a staff management system available in the UK that helps businesses streamline staff schedules and wages more efficiently. With Rotaready, you can modify your employees’ schedules based on reservation data, seasonality, trends, and more to ensure you are properly staffed.

Compliance checklist tools

Hospitality businesses should be well aware of health and safety rules they have to follow. However, maintaining safety compliance across multiple locations can be time-consuming.

With a checklist tool, a business can simplify their compliance processes across all restaurants and ensure proper standards of hygiene and safety are always met. 

Checklist tools give you reminders of vital tasks and help your team align with daily goals. With a unified checklist used by your entire team, you ensure your staff are effectively tackling daily tasks and completing their due diligence. You can clearly see what jobs are left for a shift and generally streamline your operations. 

With software like Trail, all your venues have easily accessible checklists to ensure health and safety and generally increase productivity. Trail puts all your daily jobs and reminders in one place, from checking proper fridge temperature to managing hourly cleaning tasks. 

The app will also let you report safety incidents, maintain equipment logs and regularly schedule fire safety checks. 

You can operate the app across a multi-venue business, allowing your locations to access the same checklists for smoother operations business-wide, or customised checklists specific to individual locations that require extra safety measures.

Optimise your multi-venue business with ResDiary

With our management tools for restaurant groups, you can run a smooth and effective service that prioritises customer satisfaction. Avoid overstaffing on quiet days and using crucial management time writing up pen and paper reservation plans.

That’s on top of ResDiary’s reservation management tools, marketing solutions, and much more.

Book a demo with ResDiary today and start streamlining your business.