Three divisions of customer

So here is what we know. Restaurants don't care about ordering. As long as a customer has access to their entire menu (not just two options with easy click), they're satisfied.

The big problem is delivery. After walking around to a dozen restaurants, I am able to divide them into three categories: those that manage their own delivery, those that use a third party, and those that don't have any delivery whatsoever. Always writing and taking notes and making charts, I begin to think heavily about each of these groups.

Restaurants that manage their own delivery do so for two reasons. First, delivery is a huge part of their business, often up to 50% of their entire daily revenue. Second, they have some obvious issues with third parties. Some are too expensive, some provide unbearably poor customer service, some are too slow. Whatever the case, they find it simpler to manage their own delivery. However, this is no easy task. When your core competency is making food, managing drivers, understand routes, and taking orders is an annoying, and difficult process, that only a few restaurants are able to get right. Chains like Jimmy Johns have the operational efficiency to do it well. Delivery reliant business like Bskis need the right manager. Speaking to Babatunde Omari Williams, a former manager of Bskis, I learned that once he left, their delivery almost fell apart. You need the right guy in charge of something that complicated, and it isn't easy to find the right guy.

Then you have restaurants, which make up the majority in Chapel Hill, that use third party services. Locally, that was primarily Takeout Central (formerly Tar Heel Takeout), but a California based app called Crunchbutton was newly introduced and had a few restaurants on its platform. These services gave an ordering platform for customers, faxed or emailed the restaurant when an order came through, and sent one of their own drivers over to pick it up. They were a huge help to restaurants, who could run a reliable delivery service and create an additional revenue stream without any of the managerial issues. However, there were problems here too. On the restaurant side, some services charged a 35% fee off of each order, while others do an awful job providing customer service. On the customer's end, high delivery fees, limited options, and, most importantly, slow delivery make these options a turn-off. Though with no real choices, neither hungry customers nor profit-driven restaurants have much of a choice.

Lastly, there are the restaurants that don't run delivery at all. They're either fed up with the issues with third party services, unable or unwilling to deal with the problems associated with running their own delivery, or just not ambitious enough to undertake delivery at all. Either way they are- and they often know that they are- missing out on enormous potential revenues by avoiding delivery.

The restaurant is, in many ways, the customer most important to please. We need to provide cheaper service than Takeout Central, better support than Crunchbutton, more efficiency than self-managed delivery, and better technology than anyone else out there. But we can't forget the hungry food-orderer, whose chief complaint is slow delivery times. How do we combine all of these issues into one, multi-fold solution? Next time, on Good Morning America.

Much love,

A