You Know Your Regulars. Your Till Knows Them Better.

How to use the customer data your EPOS is already collecting, without becoming a spreadsheet person.

You know your regulars. There is the couple in on a Thursday who always share the pistachio thing. The chap who has a flat white and a quiet word before the school run. The table of four who arrive loud and leave louder. You could reel off their orders in your sleep, and it is one of the small proud pleasures of running a place: you know your people.

Here is the slightly awkward bit. Your till knows them better than you do. Its just never mentioned it. While you were remembering faces and orders, it was quietly logging every visit, every spend, every gap between visits, for every customer, without ever forgetting a single one or needing a coffee. Most operators never think to ask it what it has seen. Here’s how you can start.

In our experience working with operators across hospitality and retail, fewer than a third ever use the customer data their EPOS already collects. The ones who do tend to see stronger repeat visits and higher spend per head. The information is sitting there either way. The only question is whether anyone ever looks at it. 

What “buying habits” actually means

It is a slightly grand phrase for a simple thing: the patterns in what people order, when they come in, how often they come back, what they spend, and what they tend to buy together. Nothing mysterious. It is just the stuff you half-notice across a busy week, written down properly and never forgotten.

The good news is you do not need a data analyst, a degree, or a spare weekend. If your EPOS is set up right, most of this is already there, waiting. You just have to know where to look and what you are looking for.

Customer profiles: the thing almost nobody switches on

Most modern EPOS systems will keep a little profile for each customer, tied to a loyalty card, an email or a phone number. Every time they buy, it goes on their tab, so to speak. Over time you can see their favourites, how often they visit, what they usually spend, and how long it has been since you last saw them. It is the memory you wish you had, minus the bit where you blank on someone's name while they are clearly expecting you to know it.

Setting it up is easier than it sounds; Decide how you will recognise people at the till, whether that is a loyalty card, an email or an app. Get the team asking every single time. Then check the system is filing those sales against the actual customer rather than tipping them into one big anonymous bucket.

That last part is where most places come unstuck. If only half the team remember to ask, you are only seeing half the picture, and half a picture will happily send you off in the wrong direction with great confidence.

A REAL EXAMPLE 

At one of our previous venues, loyalty data showed a little clan of regulars coming back for premium gins and working their way through the flavour combinations. We widened the gin range on the strength of that alone, and it paid off. Without the loyalty scheme quietly keeping score, that pattern would never have surfaced. We would have just thought “gin does alright” and left it there. 

What your till shows you even without a loyalty scheme

No loyalty scheme yet? You can still learn plenty. Your reports will show your best sellers by day, week and month, which things get ordered together, and crucially when you are rammed versus when you could hear a pin drop.

Say the reports show oat milk lattes spiking on cold winter afternoons. Now you stock accordingly instead of running out at 3pm, and you run a little cake pairing offer to nudge the average spend up while people are sheltering in out of the cold. That is a decision made on evidence rather than a hunch, and it cost you ten minutes with a report and nothing else.

Loyalty schemes: not really about the points

The tenth-coffee-free thing is the least interesting part of a loyalty scheme. The real value is that it slowly builds up a proper picture of individual customers: which rewards actually bring people back, who your biggest spenders are, and how your loyal lot behave differently from the folk who just tap and vanish.

The question worth asking is not “how many people have signed up?” That number flatters you and tells you nothing. The better question is “what are they doing differently because they signed up?” Worth watching: how often members visit versus non-members, how much more they spend a visit, how quickly they come back after joining, and how many of them have actually been in during the last couple of months rather than signing up once and disappearing. In a well-run venue, members typically visit 30% to 40% more often than non-members and spend a fair bit more per head, because they have got a reason to come back and a reason to be a little adventurous when they do.

You will often find your loyalty crowd are the most willing to try something new, which makes them the obvious first people to tell when you launch something. A quick email to that group costs next to nothing and lands with the people most likely to actually do something about it. And if a new dish barely registers even with them - the keen ones - that is telling you something useful before you spend money pushing it to everybody else.

Spotting what people buy together

Your till can show you the natural pairings, the little habits people fall into without thinking. The flat white that nearly always drags a pastry along with it. The product people come back to restock roughly every fortnight like clockwork. Once you can see the pattern, it stops being a curiosity and becomes something you can act on.

Take the flat white and pastry. If the data shows 60% of people ordering a flat white between 8am and 10am also grab a pastry, that is not just a nice fact. It is the basis for a gentle nudge. When a flat white gets rung in during the morning, the screen can prompt the server: “Fancy a pastry with that?” You write the wording, you pick which products set it off, and you can change it whenever the menu does.

It is a five-second question. But across a hundred morning coffees a week, at £3.50 a pastry and a 30% hit rate, that one little prompt is worth around £5,000 a year. From a thing that was already half-happening on its own, just not every time and not from the shyer members of staff. 

It works in reverse too. If a product almost never turns up alongside anything else, that is a hint. Maybe it is in the wrong spot on the menu, maybe it is priced like a treat rather than an easy add-on, or maybe nobody is ever suggesting it at the right moment. The lonely item on the receipt is trying to tell you something.

Catching the ones who quietly drift off

This is the one that saves you the most money and gets talked about the least.

When a regular stops coming in, you almost never notice at the time. There is no dramatic exit. They just come in a bit less, then not at all, and one day it dawns on you that you have not seen the Thursday pistachio couple in ages. By then they have found somewhere else and settled in.

Your EPOS can catch it while it still matters. If someone who normally comes in weekly has not been seen for 30 days, that is worth a flag. A friendly email with a small “we miss you” offer at that point often brings them back before the habit of going elsewhere sets in. Leave it to 60 or 90 days and you are not reminding them any more, you are trying to win them back, and that is a far harder pint to pull.

A few honest caveats before you dive in

This is genuinely useful, but it is not magic, and it is only fair to say where the edges are.

How Truli sets this up

At Truli, customer profiles and loyalty tracking are built into how we set a system up from the start, not bolted on as an afterthought once you have already missed a year of data. We design the reports around what an operator actually needs to know while running a business on four hours’ sleep: who is coming back, who is drifting, what is selling, and where the easy upsells are hiding.

If you are getting nothing useful out of your EPOS data right now, the reason is almost always how it was set up, not what it can do. The information is probably already there, sulking, unread. Talk to us and we will show you what your till has been quietly noticing all this time.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need a loyalty scheme to track buying habits?

Not entirely, but without one all you can see is what sold, not who bought it. You can spot that oat milk lattes fly out on winter afternoons, but you cannot tell which customers are behind it or send them a nudge. A loyalty scheme links the sale to a person, which is where it gets genuinely powerful.

Where do I start if I have never looked at my EPOS data before?

Pull your sales reports for the last three months. Look at your top ten sellers, your busiest days and times, and what people tend to buy together. Those three things alone will hand you at least one change worth making, and once you have done it once and seen it work, looking at the reports tends to become a habit rather than a chore.

Do I need to worry about data privacy rules?

Yes, but it is less frightening than it sounds. The basics: customers agree to you keeping their details, you tell them what you are doing with it, and you can remove it if they ask. Most reputable providers bake this into the loyalty sign-up. Just ask yours what they handle automatically and what you need to set up yourself, so nothing falls down the gap.

Can I take my customer data with me if I switch providers?

You should be able to, and you should nail this down before you sign anything. Ask for a straightforward export: a spreadsheet of customer profiles, purchase history and loyalty balances. Some providers make it painless. Others make it deliberately awkward to keep you locked in. The data is yours, and you are entitled to walk out of the door with it.

How much data does an EPOS system actually hold?

A properly set-up system can keep full purchase history for every loyalty customer for as long as you like, product by product, date by date, with values and payment method. In practice, most operators find that looking back 12 to 18 months is plenty to spot the patterns worth acting on. You do not need to go archaeological on it.

CURIOUS WHAT YOUR TILL ALREADY KNOWS? 

Talk to the Truli team. We will take a look at what your EPOS is already collecting and show you the patterns worth acting on. No jargon, no spreadsheets homework, just the useful bits. 

truli.co.uk      |      hello@truli.co.uk      |      01580 231 880