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MILESTONE 4

According to our research, people expect tasty food the most from a restaurant among other factors like quick seating, clean environment, and friendly server. The majority of our online survey participants think the overall taste of food in Yummy Café is just good, while others think it is bad and very few participants think it is delicious. Therefore, Yummy café’s food quality doesn’t achieve customers’ expectation, and that leads to the customer gap. To close the customer gap, we are going to focus on provider gap 2 and provider gap 3, the service design gap and the service performance gap.

Based on the “process” in the marketing theory of 7Ps, we can find the way to close the gap 2 which is the service design gap. This gap happens when organization not having the right service designs and standards. The Yummy Café has a problem which is that the average waiting time for the customers at the peak time is too long. Customers usually need to wait over 15 minutes to be seated. This is really a big problem that may causing many walked customers and need to be fixed. In my opinion, this problem can be fixed in two ways. Firstly, redesign the decoration of the restaurant. From the photo of the Yummy café, we can see there are many spaces are not being used. The restaurant can put more tables and chairs in the restaurant to have more capacities for more guests. Secondly, they can use the online app such as “inline” to provide customers to line up. Now, customers need to wait in the restaurant to be seated, they cannot leave to do other things, by using those apps, customers can be free during the waiting time and that may help close the gap.

The other P is the “people”, which is related to the service gap 3 which is the service performance gap. It is a gap happens when restaurant is not delivering to service standards. Lacking of “people” can cause poor quality of personality of waiters, service quality and no legal requirements. The research result shows the waiters in the Yummy Café are not well trained, many replies complains the staffs in the Yummy café chats during work time. When customers are asking for service, the stuffs are always responding very slow and with bad attitude. This gap can be closed by better training for the employees. On the other hand, the slack of the employees may be caused by low payment. Raising pay checks can help improve the staffs’ performance.

The other P, “product”, is also related to service performance gap. Yummy café should definitely focus on improving their service intermediaries. According to the survey we conducted, most people think their food is only “just so-so”. Some people rated it “the worst Chinese food ever”. In consistent with the previous reviews we found on yelp, people are not really into the food provided by Yummy café. The quality of their food is very inconsistent. Some people says that their “MAO CAI” which is mixing all food in spicy is good and some hate it. Through the survey, we found that people are willing to wait for a long time for good food. Since people value the quality of food the most, it is very important to focus on improving the inconsistency. One reason of the inconsistency might be the lack of training for cooks and employees. Maybe the inconsistency is caused by poor food storage and preparation. This could be fixed by training the cooks or developing a standard recipe. This is another problem for Yummy café which is deficiencies in internal marketing. There are no systematic trainings for employees since it is more of a family business. Also, the cost is high comparing to other Chinese restaurants. When customers cannot get their desired reward for the price they paid, they turn away to other restaurants. Lastly, to match the supply and demand, Yummy café should schedule more server during the meal time in order to reduce the waiting time for customers.

In conclusion, in order to close the customer gap, Yummy café should focus on closing the service design gap and service performance gap.