Behind all the brewing

Does your customer get tired waiting for a refreshing coffee!?

Interested to hear a story on how cafes are going the digital way to improve the refreshment experience?

Enterprises spend millions on efficient and customer-centric apps that pull their customers towards them. For Baristas and Cafes, pre-order of a coffee over an app had been there for a while. This helps the customer to save a lot on their time in the queue. Their order is made available by the store, and the customer picks it up. I tried this myself on a popular coffee brand app and cannot complain as a consumer-it looked pretty robust. I headed to the shop and as expected, they had not received the order, nor did they have it ready.

I figured out two things at the outlet : (1) There might not have been any emphasis on a vendor side application to mirror the customer app and (2) The barista did not expect a preorder as it is extremely uncommon.

Due to my interest in digitising customer experience, I did talk at length to the people at the coffee shop. Quite obvious that a well-designed vendor side app will improve the productivity and efficiency of the barista and undoubtedly enhance the customer experience as well. Efficient or faster Baristas will lead to happier customers.

While most Cafés have not focused much on the development and promotion of the pre-ordering business for Café’s, one notable global business venture in China went against a behemoth and captured an entire market in a very small period

The answer to that is just in their business model.

• They sell good Coffee
• Pricing(20% cheaper than the competition)
• Most importantly, one cannot under any circumstance order a coffee at the store

One either picks up their pre-ordered beverage or gets it delivered through a huge network of 3rd party delivery agents.

For a company that focused only on customer experience and the efficiency of Baristas, they have 4260 stores(November-2019) in mainland China, surpassing competing global brands in a very short span of time(2 years).