Helping cafés become more profitable

Delivering a great café experience

What makes a great café? 

As you’d imagine, that’s not an easy question to answer. Why do some cafés thrive and others, which appear to have a great offering, do not? Whatever the answer the actually experience you deliver is one of the most important things to get right. In turn, it is the operating model that enables a great experience to be delivered. Customers value basics done brilliantly and having a reliable, consistent operating model not only saves money but drives a better experience and improved income.  Satisfied customers will buy more and return frequently.  Sounds obvious, but like many things, the obvious is difficult to do. 

We have been working with a range of cafés and restaurants to mould an approach to improve efficiency and customer experience.  For example, the increased revenue gained from shorter queues or how to manage capacity - the peaks and troughs that typify what cafés have to manage.  Also, how to tailor your café to the different types of customers whether they be older people, families or students. We have found that comparatively small changes can have a disproportionate impact on the bottom line. The question is, which ones will make the difference?

So, why is the experience so important? 

Almost all companies struggle to understand what the current customer experience is and how customers ‘see it’.  Familiarity with the status quo can mean it’s difficult to think objectively and identify what needs to change and what the benefits off it would be. It is essential to understand how the experience made the visitor feel; how it mattered to them, personally.  As most organisations now accept it is emotional connection that drives customer recommendation and loyalty; this is all about how you make the customer feel.  How you manage your people is probably the single most important thing to get right to make this happen.  A barista who can build a great rapport with a customer beats a super-smooth coffee any day.  The first and last minute are also the most important parts of the experience, and the rest tends to take care of itself. So, roughly half of the success of a café is down to how make the customer feel which is why the experience is so important.  

Delivering this requires planning and organisation.  We look at this through computer simulation modelling to identify process efficiencies and capacity opportunities to improve throughput and table utilisation.  Coupled with experience design this enables changes to be identified to the operating model that will make a difference. Thus, this allows owners to understand how to improve flow and revenue per customer.  Once the current operating protocols are understood various changes can be modelled to identify areas where performance and service delivery could be improved.  This allows ‘informed experimentation’ where various changes can be trialled in the ‘real world’ to ensure theory can be translated into practice.

The video shows how the simulation model can be used to establish capacity limits in a café, the effect of queues and operating procedures for the Covid-19 pandemic.