The diner chains in India – Cafe Coffee Day, Starbucks, Barista etc. have never got it, right. Some profits trickled in during the initial years owing to the novelty factor but could never be sustained later. Maybe McDonald and KFC have it better
The rules of succeeding in hospitality are simple. That is why they are so difficult to implement. Were you a brilliant host when a wedding took place in your family? Did you make every guest feel wanted and loved during the wedding? Then you are a born host and may succeed in hospitality if you get the business end right as well.
The diner chains in India – Cafe Coffee Day, Starbucks, Barista etc. have never got it, right. Some profits trickled in during the initial years owing to the novelty factor but could never be sustained later. Customers speak ill about the Starbucks experience which has fizzled out over the years. Nowadays, they insist that there is no attempt to get the name of the customer right even if the name is inside the Starbucks ERP. This shows how the customer has gone ‘native’ (Yes Minister, BBC) The customer is no longer looking out for taste and volume of the portion but it has become an important point of satisfaction if an employee is writing the customer’s name correctly on the paper cup with a sketch pen or marker and yelling the name correctly. This ought to be something the customer ought not to think about at all. He/she is not paying for his/her name being yelled out correctly.
I may be a problem for F&B brands as I am one of those rare customers who visit any F&B outlet first for the food and drink, then other things come into my customer’s purview. I never liked the food and drink (coffee and snacks) at Starbucks. The taste of every item there was abysmal from day one. So, I may have visited Starbucks less than five times in my lifetime. The experience in all the Starbucks outlets I had visited was ehhhhh. The worst is the forced smiles with bared teeth, eyes not reflecting that smile, that these chain outlets insist on with their employees. The employees are tired and untrained. They don’t wish to smile at everyone who comes along for a coffee. Overall it’s a drain on emotions. I don’t enjoy people wrongly spelling my name or even yelling my name from the counter, banshee style. How is that different from a socialist India experience of buying subsidized rice and flour from a ration shop in the 1980s, where the ration shop owner yelled your name reading it from the stack of ration cards? Or a cheap clinic where the doctor’s assistant reads your name out loud in a roomful of uncomfortable patients? Or a court clerk almahd who yells out your name loudly when your turn for hearing comes along? Or a school teacher who yells out the name of the student when he or she has to humiliate him or her in front of other students for failing the grade in a test? Wrong strategy. Wrong move. Absolute rubbish way of dealing with customers.
The right manpower is an investment, which yields manifold. Even after hiring the right resource, if the company is still in the red, then what is usually faulty, is the product or the supply chain. The MBA style cost-cutting of cutting off your nose to spite your face, usually results in a brilliantly sorry state of affairs where the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing.
I used to visit another chain when I used to visit my wife after work in the 2000-2010 period. It was a Cafe Coffee Day. The experience was similar to Starbucks. Bad coffee and food but I consistently visited as it was the only outlet in the Bengali Market area in New Delhi, which was air-conditioned at that time. I sat there not sipping a coffee and not nibbling the snack I had bought, while I waited for my wife. The only other air-conditioned outlet there, viz Nathu’s Snack Bar had limited seats and weak air-conditioning. That holds true even today besides the fact that the Cafe Coffee Day has wrapped up and left years ago. One day, a brilliant MBA adorned manager like character handed me a feedback form and a good looking pen. He wanted to know what I thought of his outlet. I promptly wrote: The only reason I visit this place is to wait for my wife in an air-conditioned setting in the Delhi heat. The food and drink here is shit. A goat would choke on it. Surprizingly, the quality of the food went up two notches after that. The coffee and hot chocolate remained the same tepid swill.
Cafe Coffee Day India has a brilliant strategy to dis-satisfy customers. You would go to the counter ask for a cappuccino as Indians rarely drink any other type of coffee. The man or the woman behind the payment counter will always ask 1) Do you want cream on your coffee? 2) Do you want your coffee to be stronger? What they do not tell you is that these are paid for choices and that your invoice will reflect a higher amount if you choose any of these alternatives. Regardless of the size of the amount, the feeling of being cheated persists.
The Indian customer is price sensitive. Like it or not every brand is addressing this price sensitive customer in India. This includes brands such as Mercedes and Jaguar Land Rover. Maybe a few luxury consumption brands are free from this burden but CCD is certainly not one of them. How does Cafe Coffee Day not catch up with this simple truth after all these years of operations? Look at McDonald’s in India. They have pricing and service down pat for the Indian price sensitive customer. They even have delighters such as offering to hand over more ketchup sachets or chilli sauce sachets on demand – low cost but highly effective. You will never find an Indian customer anywhere in India complaining about the price of McDonald’s wares. They hit the satisfaction spot for a price sensitive and demanding customer. Meanwhile, the food at CAFE COFFEE DAY is at best average. The coffee more so. So, why doesn’t this change after all these years? Don’t they have a feedback / input integration model? Don’t they want to grow? Don’t they want to get better?
Readers are welcome to write on the South Indian coffee and diner chains in the five South Indian states. What are they called? How is the experience and the food? Comments will be welcome.
