Service design

 

Background

SaladStop is founded by Adrien Desbaillets which was first founded as a family business, co-headed by daughter Katherine and son in law Frantz Braha. With the vision to honoring nature and family dinners, it strives to provide the best dining experience, different from the one from fast food shop where the human connection is lost and everyone just tries to eat food and head to work soon after. SALADSTOP wants to create a dining experience where customers can enjoy and take their time while eating healthily. With so many branches opened in Asia, they wish to be the pioneer in terms of eating healthily, happily, and providing food responsibly.

Its first round of development is to focus on growing its footprint in Singapore first, investing in new ventures and testing its technological platforms. With Hera Capital and DSG partners introduced as the fund provider of SALADSTOP, Adrien set foot in other countries in Asia and try to later become a global enterprise

Case study

SaladStop!   was first founded in Singapore in 2009 and had many oversea branches. The rise of online food deliveries has opened a lot more business opportunities. Yet, it could mean confusion to both customers and staff. Fast- casual dining culture has been taking over and has grown 10.4 percent across the restaurant industry. Customers are looking affordable yet good quality food. They also seek premium, casual and social experiences and most of them are millennials.

In this case, the store is located on the George Street. Located along with office buildings in the city center. It is the busiest store in Singapore. Opening hours starts from 8:00 am to 8:30 pm. In view of the current problems that have been plaguing the branch, it would be undergoing renovation.

Problems

1.Long waiting times during lunch period because of the  high demand for both online and offline orders while only one employee is assigned to chopping station. In order to wait for the salad to arrive, customers would have to wait for the employee to finish processing the vegetables then can they receive the salad that they ordered. In addition to that, online orders are fulfilled prior because it has to be finished before specified collection time

2.High Variability in Quality because during non-peak hours, staff can engage in light-hearted banter with customers while during peak hours where employees are busy serving the foods in a timely manner while trying their best at keeping the quality of foods on par which lead to them having no time to engage in conversation with their customers. Also, because they are so busy preparing foods during peak hours, high stress can easily lead to mistakes and provide the wrong toppings, contrary to what the customers had specified while during non- peak hours workers have more time to prepare the meals and can make fewer mistakes when preparing customer's orders

3.High Variability in dining quality because the restaurants becomes noisy during peak hour

To cope with these issues in a more efficient and accurate manner. We need to identify the types of customers that we are serving in different time periods and base on their persona and try to provide the aspects of a meal that they want the most

Casual diners

They usually enter during non- peak hours and wants a casual and relaxing dining experience. They enjoy banter with employees and value interactions with employees there. Because of this, they will be most satisfied if the employees can remember their names and preference 

Office workers

They usually arrive at the store during peak hours. Because the length of lunch break is very limited, they value whether the meal can be delivered in a timely manner and short queue time. They will be especially frustrated if the seats are not available and they need to wait for an empty seat which will take a lot of their lunch break time.

Online: Pre-order customers

they usually take their ordered food when they arrive at the restaurant at a specified time and they order the food via mobile application. Because they dont need to eat the food inside the restaurant, they have more time to spare. Although they are still discontented with waiting for food to be ready, they will be less annoyed when compared to office workers.  However, because of the lack of urgency, they will place their priority on the quality of the food and whether they receive the correct order. They will not take up seats. Also, they can order the food whenever they see fit within the day when they eat from SALADSTOP.

Online: Delivery customers

similar in nature to pre-order customers yet the main difference is that they will not appear in person which is good news as they will not take up place inside the restaurant. They place the order in the food delivery platform and will not have any direct conversation with the employees. They also receive the best satisfaction when they receive the correct order and good quality foods.

From the above pie chart, we can see that walk-in customers are the most dominant group. Therefore, we should place our focus on improving that group of customers.

Most walk-in customers arrived the store during peak hours and take-out customers will mostly visit the store during peak hours which is 12:00pm to 2:00pm. With this in mind, the restaurant will become very crowded during lunch hours and the queue would often stretch into the dining area of the store. The customer's approximate waiting time will be 5 minutes

Confusing procedure

With the customer's flow chart, we can see that the procedure to getting the meal is quite confusing for first-time customers. First, they need to enter the store and queue the salad bar line when the cashier is exactly in front of them while the salad bar is on the right-hand side. After that, they need to walk pass the collection point and delivery customer shelves to the cashier to pay for their meal with little hint and then go back to the collection point. This not only causes trouble for customers but also prolongs the time that the customers need to be inside the store. Therefore, the store becomes unnecessarily crowded and causes discomfort to customers dining in the seating area.

For some casual customers , they are not regular customers and may be confused when the procedures to order is unclear to them

For office worker customers, because customers are confused as to which line to queue first and leads to many of the lines getting unnecessarily long and subsequently leading to them being dissatisfied when they have waited so long for the order and further disappointed when they could not find a seat afterward.

For preorder customers, the line is too long and they are frustrated and confused as to how long they need to wait. Because of the heavy workload, workers may make some mistakes when preparing for the order. Customers get confused when they find out the order is incorrect and thus disappointed

For delivery customers, the same reason leading to employees making mistakes and they are sad to find out that they receive the wrong order.

Solutions

1.Saladstop should announce a new policy limiting when the online customers would need to make their order prior to taking the food a couple hours before peak hours. This way, the employees would not be occupied with making salad for the takeout customers during lunch hours.

2.Saladstop should make more signs educating its customers how to queue to get the meal. However, if the queue becomes too long, customers may not be able to identify which line is the correct line to queue. Therefore, saladstop should implement some fool-proof design to minimize the chance of customers getting confused, for example, design a better layout plan for the restaurant where the customers flow is only one-way.

3. Saladstop can encourage customers to have take-out meals more often by providing discount incentives.

4. instruct the employees to double-check the meals to make sure it is in the right order.

5. most of the negative emotions of customers come when they are waiting. SALADSTOP can make use of the waiting time to handout menus to customers and ask them to customize their salad when they are waiting so that they will spend less time at the salad bar and be occupied when they are waiting ,also they can make a timeline which will remind the customers when will the meal be ready.

6. The salad bar chopping board only has one employee working while the whole business is heavily reliant on how fast the employee can prepare the materials and hand it for the next cooking procedure. Therefore, SALADSTOP should assign more workers at the workstation to speed up the prep process so that customers would need to wait less and the customer flow can be faster.

Reflections

Through this lecture, we can know that there are a lot of considerations that need to be put into when designing the operation plan for a business.

First, we need to carefully consider our customer's emotions when they enjoy our service. It is very important to consider the persona types of each customer to provide the most adequate service to all our customers. Some of them value time,some of them value the food, some of them just value a light-hearted banter with the employees. We must make compromises in order to give the most satisfaction to all our customers.

 Second, we need to identify the bottleneck of our business. In this case, the process of cutting vegetables is the bottleneck. If we dont constantly try to cut down on the bottlenecks, the operation will become sluggish and undesirable. Therefore, we should always try to increase the capacity of the bottleneck.

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References

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/saladstop-the-leading-salad-bar-chain-in-asia-raises-s5-million-from-hera-capital-and-dsg-consumer-partners-300327818.html#:~:text=SaladStop!%20is%20a%20family%20business,son%20in%2Dlaw%20Frantz%20Braha.

https://saladstop.com.hk/