The 9-minute takeaway coffee
During my first visit, the waiting times at the cafe seemed unusually long. The second time was no better. By my third visit, it was obvious that long waiting times were the norm here. Other customers concur.
But why do I keep on going back regardless?
The service is slow…
Take-away coffee is a means to an end; an end that typically won’t be realized at the coffee shop or cafe. Unlike the “have-here” option, time is of the essence for people ordering takeaway coffee.
Being a compulsive measurer, I began noting wait times.
- The average fell around 9 minutes, with the range spread between 7 minutes (best) and 14 minutes (worst).
- The time of purchase was mid-morning, towards the tail end of the rush hour. This is by far the longest I’ve ever had to wait for take-away coffee anywhere, even during peak times. Normally the wait has rarely exceeded 5 minutes.
- A very casual correlation is found with a study of Starbucks store’s wait times, of around 4.5 minutes.
- The best coffee serving time I’ve encountered has averaged around 2-3 minutes, even in peak hours.
Long wait times are a symptom of process and /or design issues. Both are apparent here to any observant end customer.
The lack of effective queue management is a major pain point. There is no defined queue. Customers linger in a vague formations, waiting to pickup their order. It is up to the customers to figure out who was there before them. When the name of the coffee (order) is called out, customers self-organize based on their (imperfect) knowledge of the sequence, to claim their supposed order. On more than one occasion, this has caused embarrassing confusion among customers as two people go up to claim their cappuccino. Given the long wait times, some people naturally, wander off to read a newspaper (placed a few paces away) or become busy checking their phone. This further complicates the queue as people miss their order or not be seen as being in the queue at all.
The frustrating queuing experience adds anxiety to the wait time.
Setting expectations is a cornerstone of good customer experience. The cafe, situated in an office building, offers both takeaway and dine-in options. Due to a lack of a visible queue, customer expectations are never set. There is no indicator for expected service (wait) time. At times, even if the takeaway queue area seems rather sparse, the wait time is still as long as dine-in orders are being fulfilled. Interestingly, the high-backed dine-in seats, which are great for privacy and sound proofing, make it difficult to accurately scan how many people are seated in the dine in area. The customer is denied yet another visible clue on how busy the cafe actually is, in case they want to come back later.
The underlying causes for wait time would most likely center around people or equipment capacity allied in some way with business rules which may, intentionally or inadvertently, prioritize some service areas at the expense of others. Thinking laterally, we can also conjecture that perhaps long customer wait times are an acceptable trade-off compared to other alternatives like the cost of adding another coffee machine etc.
…but offset by convenience
To put in context, the coffee is well made and charged at market prices, with a nifty discount card for frequent purchasers.
But, waiting 9 minutes for “take-away” coffee is too long in anyone’s book.
I often wonder why the cafe has not addressed this issue?
At a conceptual level, this could be due to a lack of information, lack of incentive or potentially both.
- Either the existence of the problem is not known OR
- it is actually not a problem — i.e. it’s an acceptable trade-off in the wider scheme of things
The former scenario can be chalked down to ignorance. Ignorance can be remedied through classic process improvement disciplines. The latter scenario can be chalked down to incentive, or lack thereof.
To an external observer, the second scenario seems more plausible.
The cafe has no meaningful competition nearby.
The closest coffee shops are about 200 metres away, in a retail precinct. It takes the same time to walk to them and order coffee. At average walking speed of 5km/h, the total trip with 3 min coffee serving time, also comes to around 9 minutes. But people don’t go there as much because walking is less convenient than simply standing and waiting. When we factor in the rain, wind, heat, cold etc. standing in an AC environment seems better.
The cafe has a captive audience from its own and immediately surrounding buildings. It also has a captive audience from people who value convenience. In fact, the customers I’ve talked to have all acknowledged long wait times but still queue there every day — like me.
It’s also about convenience. As they say, Location, Location, Location!
Implications for customer experience
Convenience is a major customer draw-card whose importance can never be overestimated. However, this should be balanced with service delivery.
For this cafe, there is currently no incentive to improve wait times. With no good alternative, the captive audience endures a frustrating customer experience. The day a better alternative emerges, the cafe will either be forced to make sudden changes or cede customers to the alternative option. Both options are not ideal for the cafe.
Inertia is a comfort zone which will sooner or later be disturbed by the forces of customer or competitor behavior.
The key is to look out for these forces. If this is done proactively, the resulting impact of the “unbalanced” force will be better manageable. If not, the impact will be sudden and jerky. The experiences that customers receive are the net result of how well an organization identifies, understands, analyzes and proactively acts on these forces. Organizations that do this well set standards. Organizations that do this poorly, set statistics — like our 9-minute coffee.
