Agile Leaf company wants to discuss a practice known as corporate social responsibility (CSR) adopted by multinational and small organizations around the globe. Let’s discuss the concept of CSR in a simpler term. CSR is a process in which companies develop a business model to make themselves more socially accountable to their stakeholders. Now, what does socially accountable mean or indicate?
Don’t worry, I know some terminologies have created confusion. So, just focus on the article, don’t ever lose the energy, and stop thinking about the TV series you want to see after reading the article. I am just trying to use sarcasm or situational comedy. And I know I am good at it :). Let’s move on.
First, discuss the details about being socially accountable. We know that countries around the globe have taken different kinds of initiatives to ensure that companies allocate financial capital and resources for the development of a socially conscious environment or we can say, companies create and adopt policies and practices that should create a positive impact for the overall society.
In Pakistan, the trend of CSR has also increased in recent years and we can observe different kinds of environment-friendly initiatives that are highlighted regularly in the electronic and print media. I know these projects are for the society but we need to understand how these CSR projects contribute to brand equity, meaning, the overall perception of the business improves among its customers.
Some readers may think that customers in Pakistan don’t care about the environment or hygiene conditions of a restaurant. Please conduct your research to identify how customers prefer restaurants with high-quality customer services. Customers value the restaurants which focus on the hygiene conditions and are even ready to pay premium prices to get high-quality food products.
Restaurant’s investment for improving the internal environment or its green initiatives for the overall society has an added benefit of word of mouth marketing. Such as; customers prefer to promote the products of the restaurants that invest more in green initiatives and it also reflects that the owner strongly believes in the concept of social entrepreneurship.
Restaurant Management System and Fulfilment of Corporate Social Responsibility
As a business owner, you need to decide, whether you want to develop a restaurant chain that is famous for its high-quality food products and services or just a restaurant with moderate level quality assurance. In Pakistan, there exists a high scope for small restaurants to contribute in the area of CSR initiatives. Such as, small changes in the kitchen equipment can do the job.
Our company’s market research indicates that owners of small businesses have developed a perception that large investment is required for CSR initiatives. No, not at all. It is completely opposite. Business first needs to understand the significance of CSR initiatives and how they are going to improve the goodwill of the business. Agile Leaf POS presents a Restaurant Management System (RMS) to provide solutions to the problems associated with environmental initiatives.
RMS requires one-time capital investment and then a small maintenance cost to ensure that the system keeps on operating without any kind of error. Every business leader requires the right tools and methods to fulfill the CSR. The RMS developed by Agile Leaf POS helps the business owners to identify the activities that are consuming large amounts of variable and fixed cost, and at the same time, they generate less profit for the company.
Customers usually give bad feedback about the products which are not of high quality. Hence, the business owner needs to collect these types of feedback and then analyze the data to identify patterns. The identification of patterns in customers’ feedback data helps to highlight the activities, products, and services that are not helping the company generate high-profit margins, and most significantly, customers’ feedback analysis through the RMS helps to structure the significant insights and develop reports with supportive visuals and graphics.
In today’s socially conscious environment, employees and customers give more preference to businesses that prioritize corporate social responsibility (CSR). The CSR is an evolving business practice that incorporates sustainable development into a company’s business model. It has a positive impact on social, economic, and environmental factors.
Therefore, the reports generated by the RMS provides support to identify the products and services with the highest profit-generating ability. The reports can help to identify non-usable resources in the restaurant’s environment, such as; it is quite possible that the restaurant has excessive inventory. In this kind of situation, management can save resources by determining the suitable inventory level and then allocate the additional saved financial capital for CSR activities and initiatives.
Let’s be fair, CSR initiatives require additional capital investment but the data analytics and report generating feature of RMS enables the business owners to utilize their current resources more cost-effectively. The extra generated or saved financial capital can then be used for the CSR initiatives. RMS also provides support in tracking the impact of CSR initiatives on the profits and revenues of the business, such as; a business owner can analyze the profits and revenues in pre and post-implementation period of CSR initiatives, and then identify how these initiatives have contributed towards improving the brand equity and profits.
Hence, the approach to use the RMS to integrate data Analytics with the CSR initiatives will reflect the attitude of visionary business leader, who is willing to take steps that can help to improve the brand equity, profits, and customers’ services, and most importantly, develop projects that can help to deliver different kinds of benefits to the society.
CSR initiatives also reflect the behavior of social entrepreneurship. In today’s era, customers are getting more inclined towards the business with social or welfare objectives. Therefore, profitability initiatives and CSR projects can be carried out in parallel by the restaurant owner. The approach not only helps to achieve the high-profit margin but also provides support to improve the restaurant’s goodwill.
Another benefit of CSR initiative is that customers will get motivated to promote the products of the restaurant through word of mouth marketing. Positive feedback about restaurant’s policies and activities encourage the stakeholders to get actively involved with the brand name and it further helps to compete with the competitors that are already investing large financial capital to achieve high performance.
So, please do not hesitate to contact us if you want to incorporate RMS to ensure that relevant information is available to develop CSR projects for the underprivileged segments of society.