Do you have the data you need to make good decisions?

You’ve probably seen the story making the social media rounds recently about someone in management at a busy restaurant in New York City that posted a rant on Craigslist.

The restaurant is in Midtown Manhattan and it has a good mix of locals and tourists. They’ve stayed busy but they started to notice over time that although the average number of customers they serve on a daily basis hadn’t really increased, customers were increasingly complaining about wait times (long waits for tables and slow service once seated).

The restaurant hired additional staff and even reduced the number of items on the menu in an effort to speed things up. But those changes didn’t seem to make any difference. So they hired a firm to try to help them solve the problem.

Like most restaurants, this one has several surveillance cameras. Ordinarily they don’t hang onto those recordings any longer than necessary. But in this case the restaurant had upgraded to a digital system and still had some old film tapes from 10 years prior.

When the firm compared several sittings side by side from July 2004 and July 2014 they found that service had indeed slowed down over time. The average time from when a customer was seated to when they left had increased by almost 55 minutes! The cause of that delay might surprise you however.

Roll the tape…

The wait times their customers have been complaining about are largely caused by the customers themselves! In the 2014 tapes, almost every part of the dining experience has been extended by several minutes because of the amount of time customers spend on their phones.

In the 2014 tapes customers spend several minutes connecting (or trying to connect) to WIFI before even opening their menus. About 1/3 of customers take pictures of their food before eating which takes about 4 minutes. Double that if they’re not happy and retake the photo. 1/5 of those customers then sent their food back to be reheated because it got cold while they were taking pictures. 3/4 of the tables from 2014 also spent about 10 additional minutes asking their server to take (sometimes multiple) pictures of their group and chit chatting about the photos.

Like the concept of “Ochobo” in this article, phone usage is largely a cultural thing. But I think the solution to that problem is probably a little more complex than creating a cute paper wrapper.

But the real point of this story isn’t the solution itself but the ability of the restaurant to even diagnose the real problem in the first place. They knew that service had slowed down over time. But adding staff and reducing menu options had no effect. It was only by looking at historical data (the old tapes) that they were able to see what was really going on.

What is your data telling you?

I recently met with a potential client who had spent a lot of money a few years ago to have their website built. The original developers had never installed any kind of analytics tools for them however.

So for the last seven years they’ve had absolutely no information on how customers are using their website. Or even how many people are using their website! Can you imagine owning a physical store and not having any idea how many people came into your store that day?

If you don’t have any idea what visitors are doing on your website. We should probably talk.

Give me data!

 

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Main image credit to flickr member Joe Penniston