You hear it over and over again, but you don't really believe its value until you do it for yourself. "Go talk to the customer," everybody tells you. And that's exactly what Jim Kitchen told me. "Go talk to customers, and then you'll find out if you've got something worth sticking with."
It makes sense. If you build something incredible- like the world's smallest bar stool, and are super excited about it, if you don't ask the sitters of the world if they would enjoy being closer to the ground, then you've really got nothing worth selling.
So, armed with my brilliant idea of easy, one push food ordering, I marched down to Franklin Street, the epicenter of Chapel Hill restaurants (epicenter being a dramatic, though accurate word, as Chapel Hill is essentially one small street with a dozen restaurants.)
Before I get to my first visit- just a quick note on what its like to "cold call" in person. Walking into an establishment and asking questions, often personal questions, is weird. And its annoying for all parties. The manager could be cleaning, or working, or taking a much deserved break. All of my friends are day drinking in the back yard, why can't I just join them? Doing this takes some initiative, but mostly it takes a big smile. Be excited to talk to your customers! People are fun, and these people in particular might be paying you a lot of money pretty soon. Do it with a smile, I tell myself, and anything is fun.
And here's how I do it. I walk into the restaurant, dressed casually, but cleanly, in jeans and a t-shirt. I've heard the term "first impression" so often that I have nightmares about giving off the wrong one. So I walk in, head held high and fancy Kenan-Flagler padfolio in hand. I try to give off a friendly but professional vibe. Not intimidating in a suit, not slobbish in athletic shorts. A healthy medium. I respectfully stand to the side until the cashier is finished speaking with customers, and ask for a manager. Often times, they announce themselves as such.
Whoever it is, I introduce myself, and tell them that I'm doing some research about restaurant delivery for a class. Its amazing how willing people are to give away information to students. Most say they've got a free ten minutes, and gladly answer my questions while continuing to serve customers. I'm as polite as a good southern boy might be, realizing they're doing me a huge favor. I let them talk much more than I do- you won't get any useful stuff by constantly asking questions. Just prod and poke and nudge them along, smiling, allowing pauses, and let them say all that they might want to say. Immediately after leaving each restaurant, I write down the manager's name and description, and all of the information I can remember about them. And I try to eat at their places often enough so that they begin to recognize me, and even know me by name. The better the relationship is, and the more they like you, the happier they will be to give you information and, ideally, become a customer. Now back to my first restaurant stop.
I walked into my first stop, Krispy Kreme...got a doughnut, and went home to take a nap. Just kidding. I walked in ready to pitch my brilliant idea- what if ANYBODY can order either a dozen chocolate doughnuts or a dozen glazed doughnuts with the click of a button! I'm a genius!! What would it take? What would you want? What would we have to provide you with? Ready with a list of a dozen more operational questions, I'm excited for his response.
Right away, I get a "I don't think we'd be very interested in that. Delivery sounds like it could be pretty great, if we didn't need to run it ourselves, but I think we would want all of our options." Well, okay. At least he talked to me. I walk out, take a few notes, and move on to my next victim: Time Out.
An establishment as old as Chapel Hill itself (again, dramatic, but they're undoubtedly a Chapel Hill institution), Time Out is the 24 hours biscuit and southern cooking fast food joint that's been serving drunk students for decades. I walk in with the same questions, but the conversation switches almost immediately away from my easy ordering idea, to delivery. He didn't seem at all excited about the idea, but very willingly told me about their current delivery system.
A company called ChowNow built out an app for them, for a monthly fee, that allows mobile ordering. I check it out, and the app looks great! Clearly its done by professionals with an eye for design and expertise in restaurant ordering. The only problem is, it doesn't provide delivery drivers. The owner Eddie explains to me that when an order gets placed, he calls an Uber or a taxi, and asks them to come pick up the food, and deliver it to the customer.
It seems like a complicated, annoying, and potentially expensive process to me, one that can definitely be simplified. A few more stops to Franklin Street restaurants, and it dawns on me- the problem isn't ordering...its delivery!
All of these restaurants understand the value of delivery, but so many of them are fed up with the current available options. Each restaurant manager I speak to, though I intended the conversation to take a very different route, tells me all about how much doing delivery sucks, though it continues to support up to 50% of the business.
Over time, I divide up restaurants into three fields: those that run their own delivery, those that use a third party, and those that do not have any delivery at all. Each type of restaurant, it appears, has an issue. Managing drivers is annoying and expensive. Third parties are expensive, and often do not have the customer service expected of them. And if you don't run delivery at all, you're losing out some some enormous potential profits.
And so, our first pivot. Perhaps fun, easy ordering isn't the right way to go. Perhaps, that is the world's tiniest bar stool. Customers have spoken- the problem isn't ordering, its delivery. In the next post, I'll talk about all of the writing I did about the idea, and how much that helped me.
Much love,
A
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