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Last week, we started a research on the Yummy Café and the method we used was the survey. We used Google form to make a survey and shared it online. We also put the URL of the survey to Tweitter and shared with our friends. The link of our survey is :

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdgZuEtmu5ba3HD9ItXDfR0hCiEY3cELOpTNgcA8ZWUBwfbDw/viewform?usp=sf_link

The characteristics of our survey are shown on the result. We had 23 person did the survey for us and 91.3% of them are Chinese. It is understandable because Yummy Café is a Chinese restaurant and focus on spicy food, this combination is really focus on Chinese customers. We have 21 Chinese, 1 from Asian and one from Peru. The age of our survey taker are mostly 21, one is 19, two 20, four 22, one for 24,25,27, and three over 30. It shows most people we are doing research on are students. In the 23 people, 21 said they usually eat Chinese foods and 16 said they eat spicy foods multiple times a week. We also have 3 said eating Chinese food once a week, 2 said 1-2 times a month and 2 said rarely eating Chinese food. It is a good distribution shows our research target different kinds of people and will give a credible result.

The data analysis strategy we use is basic descriptive statistics, it is a summary statistic that quantitatively describes or summarizes features of a collection of information. We put the number of the survey to pie chart and bar chart to analysis the result.

Our research question is “how to improve the image and service of Yummy Café”. According to our research, we found out that among all the aspect, “great food” matters the most to customers. In contrast with what we anticipated, “quick seating” is not as important comparing to all other aspects. I would conclude that, as long as the food is good, people do not care about waiting time. Half of the participants think a 10-15-minute wait is acceptable for a casual dining restaurant. This is the place we find a service gap. It is the gap 2 which is the service design gap, according to the online comments of the Yummy Café, we can find out the average waiting time is way longer than the expected time we get from out participants, it may because of the bad design of the service and letting customers waiting for too long.

Although the majority cares about the dining environment, there are also some of them saying that environment does not matter as long as there is high quality food. As we ask them what is their favorite Chinese restaurant in State College, most people commented Little Szechuan because they have the best tasting food. Therefore, Yummy café should be focusing on improving their food quality as that is what customers value the most. As the result shows that most people like MaoCai (“stew everything in spicy”) the best in Yummy Café. However, there are also a lot of them saying that they are most disappointed at the MaoCai and HongShaoRou(pork). In my opinion, the most beneficial action for Yummy Café would be focusing on improving the quality of their signature dishes, spicy Szechuan food, rather than creating more dishes which are not local Szechuan food.

Also, the result shows that most people like to spend at most 1 hours on having a meal. This shows why people are frustrated when they have to wait for a long time to get their food. Some participants suggest Yummy café making more discounts for students. Maybe the restaurant can set a new policy like giving 10% discount if waiting time is more than 15 minutes.